


changed your way of life

by flowermasters



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Background Relationships, Card Games, Developing Friendships, Developing Relationship, F/M, Insomnia, Mild Sexual Content, Minor Emori/John Murphy (The 100), Minor Monty Green/Harper McIntyre, POV Female Character, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Sleepwalking, and writing and sleeping and also some hanky-panky, because what else is there to do in space?, like really ... unnecessary amounts of card games
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-05
Updated: 2017-09-05
Packaged: 2018-12-24 02:36:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 25,530
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12003189
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/flowermasters/pseuds/flowermasters
Summary: Echo and Bellamy have trouble sleeping.





	changed your way of life

**Author's Note:**

> Posting this on a whim, so let's go, I guess?
> 
> Warnings for: Bellamy/Echo-centric (with background canon pairings), mild sexual content, discussions of past trauma, Echo having ~feelings.
> 
> ETA: Somehow AO3 ate like the last 15% of this fic? I've added it back in, but it may not be precisely the same draft as what previously appeared.

The trouble begins on the first night that isn’t really night.

They’ve been on the Ark for only a matter of hours, not enough time to explore, to forage for supplies in all the dusty rooms, but they are all exhausted after nearly running out of air. They unload their boxes of supplies—which suddenly seem even more meager than they did on the ground—from the ship that brought them here. Raven, Monty, and Bellamy disappear for a while, checking on the rest of the ship, while Murphy and Harper prepare MREs—meals, Echo learns, covered in clingy material and stale as week-old bread. They don’t actually require much preparation, other than removing the wrappings and resigning oneself to one’s fate, but it’s a quiet process nevertheless.

Raven, Monty, and Bellamy return, apparently satisfied that they aren’t all going to drop dead at any given moment, and the seven of them eat together in silence, sitting clustered at a table in what Murphy calls a _mess hall_. The conversation stays at a bare minimum, as nobody has energy to expend on anything other than eating. Across from her, Bellamy is taking what seems like an exceptionally long time cutting his serving of dried meat and eating it; Echo isn’t sure if this is due to lack of enthusiasm or to exhaustion. Emori leans against Murphy’s shoulder, having eaten quickly, as though she thought it might be taken away. Monty’s bandaged hands make it difficult for him to handle his utensils, though Harper helps him as discreetly as she can. Echo watches them all in turn as she eats, looking away when anyone glances up, wary of being caught staring.

After some time, a seemingly endless stretch of it, Raven sets down her fork with a soft clatter. “So,” she says. “Time for a crash course in Ark skills.”

“Do we have to do this now?” Murphy asks dully.

“Don’t whine,” Raven says. “I did say a crash course.”

Raven looks up and down the table with raised eyebrows, as if waiting for other protests. When none come, she proceeds. “I know we’re all filthy, but no showers tonight. The recycler’s up and running, but best to give it some time to work out any kinks. Water’s rationed—three minutes and it gets icy, four minutes and it shuts off.”

This doesn’t seem to be cause for surprise to anybody else, so Echo says nothing. Raven’s eyes linger first on Emori—sitting directly across from her—and then on Echo, seated to Emori’s left, before she continues. “Lights out is in about two hours—that means the lights in the personal quarters will start to dim, to let you know the workday is officially over. You can turn the lights back on if you want, or they’ll come back on again by themselves after the sleep cycle. I guess we can all have free pick of rooms.”

Echo had given some thought earlier, while unloading boxes, as to where she would be sleeping for the next five years. She’d been worried that she might have to share with a stranger—or worse? better? with Bellamy—as she was unsure how much room there would be to spare here.

A frivolous concern, since having a place to rest her head means she has survived another day, but Echo remains conscious of her role here, even if the others seem to have forgotten it for now. Eventually, though, they will remember that she is the outsider, the traitor, the waste of someone else’s oxygen.

She’s oddly grateful for the size of the ring, even as it intimidates her. Based on the sheer number of tables and seats in the mess hall, there’s more than enough room to go around. This place was always meant for more than the paltry number that inhabits it now.

“Raven and Monty discussed it, and there’s really nothing that has to be done right now, unless there’s an emergency,” Bellamy says, looking to Raven and then around at the rest of them. “I think it’s safe to say we’re all tired. Once we get everybody settled in a room, get some rest, and be ready for breakfast early tomorrow. We’ve got some long days ahead of us.”

“Yeah, about five years of them,” Murphy says dryly.

Dinner comes to a quiet conclusion after that, and once they’ve cleaned up after themselves—at Bellamy’s insistence—they make their way into the corridor, with Bellamy and Raven leading the way. The signs on the doors that they pass gradually give way to numbers. Echo assumes this means the rooms have changed in purpose, perhaps from utility to housing, though the hallway stretches on ahead without end in the same orderly, gray fashion.

The claiming of quarters doesn’t take long. They’re all the same, according to Bellamy, except for a few details that may have shifted or been replaced over the decades. Bellamy picks a door seemingly at random, with Raven selecting the door to the left of his. Monty and Harper disappear together into the room on the other side of Raven’s, murmuring their farewells.

Murphy and Emori move to slip further down the corridor before Bellamy reins them in. “Best to stay close, in case of an emergency,” he says, in answer to Murphy’s insolent eye roll. “Bad luck getting stuck next to them, Echo.”

Echo blinks, surprised at being addressed, as she has been observing everyone else’s comings and goings in silence. As she stands between Bellamy and the others, Bellamy must have assumed that she had intended to take the room next to his. She had, but she hadn’t planned on making a show of it.

“Yeah, I’m sure she’s really worried about us, Bellamy,” Murphy says, over his shoulder as he leads the way into his new quarters. Echo is unsure whether to take this as an insult or a joke—with what she has observed of Murphy, the boundary between the two is thin. Emori offers Echo a brief grin as she follows Murphy inside, which Echo doesn’t have time to return before the door shuts behind them.

Now she and Bellamy are the only ones in the corridor. Echo turns to face her door, looking to the small box next to the doorframe. She hadn’t been paying close attention to how everyone else got in, only to which doors they chose. They had each pressed one of the buttons on the box before opening the door, but there were several buttons, most with numbers on them.

“Green button,” Bellamy says, nodding at the box. “Raven wiped all the passcodes so we’d have access to everything.”

Echo presses the green button, and the lock clicks audibly. She reaches out and grabs the handle, tugging the heavy, sliding door open with a loud screech of metal. “We’ll find you some oil tomorrow,” Bellamy says, as Echo steps into her new room. “To grease that.”

Echo nods, looking slowly around the room. It’s bigger than she expected, with two beds, one against the left wall and one against the right. There’s a table in the corner, accompanied by two chairs, and a set of drawers built into the wall between the beds. She didn’t shut the door behind her, and Echo realizes abruptly that Bellamy is still standing in the corridor, as if waiting for her to respond.

When she turns to look at him again, he’s studying her, his brow furrowed slightly. “Anything else I should know?” she asks to break the silence, his scrutiny setting her strangely on edge.

“Plenty,” Bellamy says, with a huff of air that sounds amused. “But Rome wasn’t built in a day.”

Echo frowns. “Rome?”

To her surprise, Bellamy almost smiles, although he looks too tired to manage the whole thing. “Figure of speech,” he says. “If you need something, you know where to find me.”

“Thank you,” Echo says, as he steps out of the doorway. He doesn’t respond, but he must’ve heard her. A moment later, his door opens and shuts, and then there is silence.

Left to her own devices, Echo is unsure what to do. Sleep, as Bellamy suggested, but despite her aching body, her heavy limbs, the idea seems laughable now. Without the others around to be observed, everything seems much quieter and smaller than before. She had assumed being alone would give her some welcome peace, but instead she finds herself pacing, oddly nervous. She will not be able to sleep, not without knowing what she’s dealing with first.

She’d like to explore the Ark without the others watching, but the prospect is daunting after the day she’s had, and anyway, there will be time yet for that. There isn’t much to explore in her quarters, but Echo does her best. She examines every inch, looking under the beds, poking through the items in the small dresser—discovering a few shirts and one pair of pants, all too big for her, in the process. The clothes look and feel cleaner than the bloody, sweaty ones she’d brought on her back, but Echo feels it might be best to save them, perhaps to trade them for something else tomorrow.

Tomorrow. Does such a thing even exist anymore?

She chooses the bed on the left side of the room, wary of picking the wall she shares with Murphy and Emori’s room; she consciously ignores the fact that this puts her closer to Bellamy by default. For a long while she sits in silence, cross-legged on the bed. She closes her eyes, willing herself to breathe slowly and steadily, to stamp out the restless energy that plagues her. The ship rattles and hums rhythmically, almost as if it breathes alongside her, around her. As if she is in the belly of a beast, or in a cage, surrounded by the breathing of hundreds, merging into a sound that is no longer human at all.

She isn’t sure how long she sits there, too frightened to move, but she must lie down at some point, and the lights must go off eventually. Her sleep, when it finally comes, is restless, fragmented.

When she wakes, she’s wearing the wrong clothes.  

* * *

Had this been the only occurrence, she might have forgotten it. Perhaps she woke in the night, her burned skin itching in her dirty clothing, and put on the clothes from the drawer, then forgot all about it. Such a thing would not be cause for alarm, if it had not continued.

The next day consists of work, for all of them. Monty and Harper begin tending to the algae farm, which will soon prove essential to their survival. Raven has repairs to make, and disappears for the greater part of the day. Bellamy appears and disappears intermittently, but Echo is fairly certain he spends most of the day trying—in vain—to make radio contact with the ground.

For her part, Echo joins Murphy and Emori in cleaning and organizing. Bellamy gives them no further instructions at breakfast than “find something productive to do,” so this will have to suffice. There’s been no opportunity for filth to gather with no one living here for months, but the kitchens and showers warrant a good scrubbing. They investigate several storage rooms, searching for fresh clothing, soap, and other supplies.

By dinnertime, Echo is somehow even more sore and tired than she was the day before. Falling asleep comes with slightly less difficulty the second night—and then she wakes up in the wrong bed.

Now there’s no excuse to be made for it; she has been moving around in her sleep, something she has not done—to her knowledge—since childhood, just after she began training for the Royal Guard. This place must have awoken something childlike in her, rattled her nerves so much that she cannot even rest safely. But fear in a child is cowardice in an adult—she must find a way to stop this now, before it gets any worse.  

Echo can only hope that she has remained in the confines of her room. If the others discover this, they will undoubtedly see it for the weakness that it is. On the ground, this kind of thing could get her killed—she could wander, aimless and unaware, into the clutches of an enemy. Here, perhaps she could wander out into space, and be dead before she even has the chance to wake.

She begins her efforts on the third night, by using a sheet from the spare bed to tie her wrist to the handle of the drawer nearest her bed. It’s not entirely comfortable, and she’s forced to sleep with one hand hanging in midair, but perhaps it will encourage her sleeping body to remain in bed.

She wakes in a panic in the middle of the night when she crashes to her knees, her body apparently having failed to remember that it was yoked to the wall.

She tries the rope once more on the fourth night, fully expecting to wake up on the floor again, but instead wakes curled on her side the next morning, fully untied. Her wrist aches slightly, as though she pulled for some time before untying it in her sleep. The door to the hall is open.

If the others have noticed any nighttime excursions, they say nothing. A week into their stay, Bellamy does take note of her exhaustion at breakfast. “You feeling okay?” he asks, as they’re clearing away the remnants of their meal. He speaks quietly, as though wary of being overheard by the others, who are clearing their own plates and talking quietly amongst themselves. “You’re looking kind of pale.”

“I’m fine,” Echo says, not meeting his gaze. He looks pale, too—they all do, from lack of sunlight—but she must look especially so for him to comment on it.

“None of us are really looking our best here, Bellamy,” Raven says, walking by, but her eyes linger on Echo’s face as she passes. They are becoming suspicious.

She begins working harder during the day, staying on the move as much as she can. The amount of work that needs to be done declines with each passing day, but she volunteers for anything and everything—arranging boxes of supplies, mopping floors, once even crawling into an air duct for Raven. She exercises in her room in idle hours, doing pushups, jogging in place, practicing the fighting moves that can be performed without a partner. She tires herself out, pushing her healing body as far as she can, in the hopes she will sleep soundly at night.

This only seems to make things worse. She wakes out of her room for the first time, finding herself in the corridor in front of Monty and Harper’s door, convinced she ought to be somewhere else. Three weeks into their time on the Ark, she wakes sitting in the mess hall, disoriented, wondering why the others are not there for breakfast.

Soon she will have to give up sleep altogether.

* * *

“Echo?”

There’s a hand on her shoulder, shaking her. Echo starts awake, squinting against the glare of artificial lights above. She tips her head forward from where it rests against a wall; a muscle in her neck twinges painfully. Bellamy is crouching in front of her, studying her face. He’s frowning. Something must be wrong.

“What?” Echo says hoarsely. She swallows, tries again. “What is it?”

“You tell me,” Bellamy says. “Do you know where you are?”

Echo looks over Bellamy’s shoulder at the wall of sinks several feet behind him. She’s in one of the shower stalls, sitting on the tile floor with her back against the wall. Murphy leans against one of the sinks, arms crossed over his chest, watching her and Bellamy with his usual air of sleepy-eyed disinterest. Echo looks away from Murphy quickly, her cheeks heating as she nods once in answer to Bellamy’s question. It’s bad enough that Bellamy has seen her this way. At least he’s already seen her at her worst, more than once, so another time can’t do too much damage.

“Do you know how you got here?” Bellamy asks, still watching her closely. His tone is uncommonly soft. It is this gentleness, more than anything, that snaps Echo out of it.

“No,” she says. “Maybe I fell. Hit my head.”

She’d taken her daily shower after their evening meal the night before, and made it back to her room afterwards without incident. She didn’t encounter Bellamy on the way to or from the showers, but she did see Raven coming in as she left. But her hair isn’t even slightly damp, and most obvious of all—she’s fully clothed, with no change of clothing or bathing supplies in sight.

“Does your head hurt?” Bellamy asks, raising his eyebrows at her.

“A bit,” Echo says. This is not entirely untrue. She has a dull headache, either from poor sleep or from leaning her head against the wall. She refuses to look away from Bellamy, because looking away might mean meeting Murphy’s eyes. She can still pretend to be without shame in front of him and the others, for now.

“Can you stand?”

Echo nods, moving to push herself up from the tiles. Bellamy straightens up more quickly than she does, and to her surprise and embarrassment, reaches out as if to keep her steady when she rises to her feet. “Let’s get you back to your room, yeah?”

Echo nods again, her lethargy giving her enough time to remember to hold her tongue. Arguing will only raise his suspicions even further—better to accept his help and be done with it. She walks with Bellamy to the door, avoiding Murphy’s gaze as she walks past the row of sinks.

“What time is it?” she asks, once they reach the corridor.

“Almost time for breakfast,” Bellamy says, glancing at her. Echo can see him looking out of the corner of her eye, but keeps her gaze forward. “Murphy was headed in for a shower when he found you.”

“Murphy found me,” Echo clarifies, hardly aware that she’s speaking, only that it’s something to say—something to keep Bellamy from asking any more questions, well-meaning though he might be.

“Yeah,” he says. “Don’t think his brain works too well in the mornings—or ever, actually—but he came and got me.”

He must’ve woken Bellamy, or pulled him from his room, at least. As her mind catches up with the world around her, Echo notes that Bellamy’s curls are sleep-tousled, and his bootlaces aren’t tied—as though he’d put his shoes on in a hurry.

“You sure you’re alright?” Bellamy asks, as they reach the door to Echo’s quarters. Mercifully, she didn’t leave the door open in the middle of the night.

“Of course,” Echo says, pushing the green button on the keypad, meeting his eyes only briefly as she does so. The door gives its customary squeal as she pulls it open; she’s held off oiling it in the hopes that the noise may wake her up on nights when she is prone to wandering. As of yet, it has not succeeded.

“Right,” Bellamy says, with a dash of skepticism. “Well—see you at breakfast.”

“See you,” Echo repeats mindlessly, entering her room without looking at Bellamy again. She does not wish to see the wariness in his eyes any more than she must.

* * *

With each day that passes, they have more leisure time to fill. The algae crop, according to Monty, is flourishing. The communications systems are still down, although that doesn’t stop Bellamy from spending hours each day listening. Echo makes herself useful doing whatever tasks the others allot for her—helping Raven fix faulty pipes or holding a flashlight for Monty and Harper while they rewire panels. A routine develops. They begin to play card games in the evenings after slow days. On the one-month anniversary of Praimfaiya, Murphy discovers something called Scrabble hidden away in a closet—although he loses most of his enthusiasm for it when Bellamy soundly beats them all.

Echo knows her secret cannot remain hidden forever. Her efforts to stop herself from sleepwalking have all failed. Sleeping remains both difficult and dangerous. It is only a matter of time, then, before someone catches her in the act.

Five weeks and two days into their stay, Echo makes her way to Raven’s workshop not long after breakfast, anxious as ever for a task to occupy herself with. She has just entered the room, finding Raven already bent over her worktable, tinkering with bits of scrap metal, when Bellamy calls out behind her.

"Echo, hang on a second.”

Raven looks up from her tools; Echo turns to face Bellamy, who comes to a halt in the doorway. “Yes?” Echo asks. She had hoped that Bellamy wouldn’t seek her out this quickly, but he is not of an easily deterred sort.

She’d noticed his eyes on her at breakfast, and had a feeling, low in her gut, that she knew why he was studying her so closely. Him seeking her out now all but confirms her suspicions.

Bellamy glances over her shoulder, at Raven, then looks back at Echo. “Can I talk to you for a second?” he asks. That’s odd. He and Raven are friends, and share leadership roles with ease—Raven concerns herself mostly with the upkeep of the Ark and Bellamy with the wellbeing of the people on it. He has no reason to keep anything involving Echo from Raven.

It occurs to her suddenly that he might be doing it for her sake, not for Raven’s; perhaps he suspects how badly she does not want this to become common knowledge. Still Echo hesitates, caught between the temptation to avoid this conversation or getting it over with. “I was going to see if Raven needed any help today.”

“Whatever this is, don’t do it here,” Raven says, lowering the protective glasses she wears to rest farther down on the bridge of her nose. “Unless something’s wrong?”

“Nothing’s wrong,” Bellamy says. “Echo?”

Echo nods, and Bellamy moves further out into the hallway, watching her expectantly. Echo steps out as Raven calls from behind her, “If one of you could find me another power strip, that’d be great.”

Bellamy leads her a little way down the corridor, stopping and rounding on her once they are out of earshot from Raven’s workshop. “Do you remember what happened last night?” he asks, frowning.

Echo swallows, insides running cold at the sudden thought that she might have done something to make a fool of herself in front of him. She could almost live with it if she’d done something dangerous, or even something that threatened the safety of the others, but she cannot stomach the idea of embarrassing herself. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she says finally.

“I think you do,” Bellamy says. “You’ve been sleepwalking.”

Echo forces herself to take a breath. There it is, out in the open. Judging by the conviction in Bellamy’s expression, there’s no way around the truth now. “What did I do?”

Bellamy blinks, as though surprised. Perhaps he expected her to deny it further. She might have, had there been any point at all now that she knows he must have witnessed it. Bellamy is no fool; she will never convince him that he saw anything other than what he did.

“Nothing, really,” he says slowly. “I was in the comm center last night when I saw you walking by. I said your name and you stopped and looked at me, then kept walking.”

Echo frowns. Surely she must have done something more notable, if it has bothered him this much. “What else?”

“Something didn’t feel right, so I followed you while you wandered back to your room. It was like you didn’t even know I was there—that’s how I knew you were out of it,” Bellamy says. “That and your eyes.”

“My eyes?”

“You just—weren’t there, I guess,” he says, shrugging. “It was a little creepy, to be honest.”

Echo tries not to be insulted by this; she knows what she must look like, wandering the Ark like a ghost. If she had encountered herself in the dead of night, she might have been unnerved, too. “Well, I’m sorry for disturbing you,” she says. “It wasn’t intentional.”

“Clearly,” Bellamy says dryly. “Have you always done this?”

Echo hesitates. If she tells the truth, he may realize just how deeply life in the sky has affected her. If she lies and says yes, he may think of her as some kind of freak. “No,” she says finally. “Not since I was a small child.”

Bellamy nods slowly, as if in understanding. “My sister did it once or twice when she was a kid,” he says. “Scared the hell out of my mom. She thought Octavia might wander out while we were asleep, get us caught.”

There’s a moment’s pause, during which time Echo wonders where this conversation is going. She’d rather Bellamy had never seen her, of course, but she isn’t as starkly ashamed now as she’d been expecting to feel. Bellamy is watching her again in that way of his, like she’s a riddle to be worked out. Perhaps he’s weighing this new information, trying to decide whether it presents a vulnerability or a threat.

“So if you knew,” Bellamy says finally, “why didn’t you tell anybody?”

“Why do you think?” Echo says, resisting the urge to roll her eyes. If he knows her well enough to understand that she wouldn’t want Raven or the others to know, then he ought to know why she hasn’t told anyone without making her say it.

Bellamy frowns at her again. “Well, you should have,” he says. “It’s not something you can control, so there’s no sense being embarrassed.”

Echo just stares at him for a few seconds, not bothering to offer a retort. He knows exactly why this embarrasses her. Had their roles been reversed, he would be embarrassed, too. “Fine,” Bellamy says, frustrated. “But this isn’t safe, Echo. You could hurt yourself.”

 _Or someone else_ hangs unspoken between them. It’s not unheard of for a sleepwalker to attack someone whilst in the grip of dreams or nightmares. Here, it’s not even that simple; she could do something that would damage their stores of food, their water, their air—the only things tethering them to life. All of these things and more have occurred to her each morning she finds herself in the wrong place. “I haven’t yet,” is all she says.

“Well, there’s still time,” Bellamy says, rolling his eyes. “I don’t know if you could actually walk out of an airlock in your sleep, but if you turn up missing one day, I guess it’ll be an easy mystery to solve.”

“What do you suggest, then?” Echo snaps.

“Have you been locking your door at night?”

“How clever. It never occurred to me.” One of the first things she had done while taking in her new quarters had been figuring out which button locked the door from the inside. She has nothing to steal, and nobody here could harbor reasonable hopes of killing her in her sleep, but old habits die hard.

“Very funny,” Bellamy says. “Tried cuffing yourself to the bed?”

“I tied myself with a bedsheet.”

Bellamy scoffs. “Well, that wouldn’t hold anyone.”

Echo rolls her eyes. “I’m skilled at tying knots. And at getting out of them.”

Bellamy shakes his head, but somehow with as much amusement as frustration. Echo finds herself irrationally pleased by this sight, a feeling which she does her best to bury before she speaks again.

“So what else is there?” she asks after a beat, when he doesn’t offer up any more suggestions. “I’ve tried meditation before bed. I’ve tried exhausting myself.”

Bellamy’s expression sobers. “I can access security feeds from the comm center,” he says. “I’ll have to figure out how to turn the cameras back on, but I’m in there most nights. I can keep an eye out, if you want.”

The merits of this are obvious: she’ll have someone watching who can prevent her from wandering into places she shouldn’t be. But the very idea of someone observing her when she is at her most vulnerable is an unnerving one. Still, now that Bellamy has offered it, she’ll have no way of knowing whether he’s doing it anyway. At least she won’t be capable of feeling self-conscious while asleep.

She nods. “Yes.” Then, “Thank you.”

Bellamy nods in return. “No problem,” he says.

There’s another pause, and this time, Echo holds Bellamy’s gaze, searching—however briefly—for something to distrust. This is, for now, a secret between the two of them, but it is still her secret. He could use it against her, if he wanted to. “You won’t tell anyone?” she asks finally, aware that even asking the question makes her look weak.

On the ground, she would not have asked—she would not have had to. The threat of a blade to the throat would have been enough to keep anyone quiet, even Bellamy. How fortunate, then, that she does not have a blade anymore. Even if she did, she would not threaten him with it now. That is one old habit she has been happy to bury.

“Not if you don’t want me to,” Bellamy says. “Raven might ask about it, though. Or Murphy. I doubt he was fooled by your little ‘I fell’ act, either.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Echo says quickly. “This is temporary, until I can make it stop.”

Bellamy hesitates, then nods. “Alright.”

Echo doesn’t attempt to argue, although she can feel him doubting her. Arguing means entertaining the idea that she may continue this way indefinitely, plagued by restlessness, always wondering what she will do when she is no longer in control of her body. She cannot allow herself to admit the possibility of defeat.

“Well,” she says finally. “Do you know what a power strip looks like?”

Bellamy lets out a surprised huff of a laugh. “Yeah,” he says. “I do. There’s a storage closet near electrical. Probably our best bet.”

Echo falls into step beside him as he moves down the corridor, although she’s certain she could find the closet he speaks of on her own, thanks to her daytime explorations of this place. She had expected them to go their separate ways after this strange conversation, but he’d said _our_ , as if they are going on this errand together—which means that they are, now.

It’s not new, walking alongside him, but Echo is suddenly more aware of his presence than she ever has been—and she’s always been _aware_ of it, in a way that goes beyond even the usual level of sharp attention she pays to the people around her. They walk side-by-side, only a foot or so apart, almost close enough to bump shoulders.

“There,” Bellamy says, drawing to a halt and nodding to indicate a door on her right which bears the marker _Storage – Electrical_. Echo presses the green button on the keypad by the door without being asked, a familiarity by now.

The room is cramped and untidy, lined with shelves that are covered in stray wires and cords, already picked over by either Monty or Raven. It takes Bellamy about thirty seconds of scanning the shelves to identify what they’re looking for. “Here,” he says, holding up a long, thin metal device by an attached cord. “Power strip.”

“Ah,” Echo says, taking it from him and noting the uniform little holes in the strip’s surface, which she recognizes as being for electrical plugs. If Bellamy finds her naivete laughable, he doesn’t let on, except for an amused quirk of his mouth. “Shall I do the honor of giving it to Raven, or you?”

“Knock yourself out,” Bellamy says, still amused. “I’m headed to the comm center, and it’s only two doors down.”

Echo nods, backing away from the doorway so that he can step out into the corridor. He shuts the door to the storage room and heads on his way, two doors down on the right. Echo can’t be sure why, but her curiosity overpowers her, just this once. “Bellamy?”

“Yeah?” he says, pausing in the doorway to what Echo privately thinks of as the radio room.

“Why are you there so late at night?” Echo asks, nodding to indicate the room behind him. Surely if he had heard from someone on the ground, he would’ve told everyone. But now, with the odds of hearing anyone so low, it seems foolishly optimistic to spend one’s nights tinkering with the radio.

Bellamy looks at her for a moment, thoughtful, before he answers. “Guess you’re not the only one with trouble sleeping.”  

She’d had an inkling that he might answer that way. It occurs to her as Bellamy turns and disappears into the radio room that she’s not the only one who has seen—and done—the stuff of nightmares.

* * *

 

Echo tries not to dwell on the idea that Bellamy is, in all likelihood, observing her nightly comings and goings. They don’t speak of it for several days, partly because they have little opportunity to talk privately without the others noticing, and also because there seems little reason to mention it. Things seem to be going smoothly, for now; Echo wakes in her room every morning for five days straight, and only twice in the wrong bed.

She isn’t sure if her sleeping body is managing to make its own way back in the night, or if Bellamy is somehow shepherding her back to her room without waking her. If he is, he doesn’t let on. She does roll over one morning in bed, half-conscious and disoriented, fleetingly convinced that she can feel Bellamy’s hand on her shoulder. She isn’t sure whether this notion comes from memory or a dream. She doesn’t ask.

On the sixth night, she wakes to disappointment. She knows the pattern has broken when she wakes on the floor with her back against the wall of a low-lit room. Opening her eyes this time reveals a wall of screens before her instead of sinks, and looking to her right reveals Bellamy in profile, sitting in front of a console. The room is quiet but for the usual hum of machinery and the faint crackle of the radio.

“What time is it?” Echo asks quietly.

Bellamy starts, nearly dropping the glowing tablet in his hands. “You scared the hell out of me,” he says reproachfully, swiveling the chair so that he can look at her directly.

“Did you not know I was here?” Echo asks, confused. She wants to rub her eyes, but resists the childish urge.

“Of course I knew you were there,” Bellamy says. “Even you aren’t that sneaky.”

“We both know I am,” Echo replies dryly. She rolls her shoulders once, then twice, then cracks her neck. She’s stiff from sleeping on the floor, and embarrassed to find herself there, but her sleep was restful—restful enough that she’s almost disappointed to have woken from it.   

“It’s a little after oh-one-hundred,” Bellamy says finally. “You’ve been here for about an hour.”

“Here?” Echo asks. “Why?”

“Your guess is as good as mine,” Bellamy says, tapping something on the screen of the tablet which makes it go dark. “You went off-course tonight.”

“Course? What course?”

“I think you have a pattern. Or at least, you linger in the same places. Tonight, though, you walked right in, stood there for a few minutes, then sat down and didn’t move.” He pauses. “I’d say you got tired, but, well.” 

“Why didn’t you wake me?” Echo says, her cheeks heating. Days ago, he called her sleepwalking _creepy_ ; she can only imagine how unnerving her behavior must have been tonight. 

“You’re not supposed to wake a sleepwalker,” Bellamy says, frowning at her. “I was going to walk you back to your room if I could, but I thought I’d let you sleep for a while. Really sleep.”

Echo hesitates, the words _thank you_ on the tip of her tongue. She’s been thanking him a lot lately, more often than she’s ever said the words in her life, but then, she owes Bellamy more than she has ever owed anyone else. She wonders if he’s noticed. “I am really sleeping,” is all she says. “Technically.”

“Doesn’t seem very restful, I guess.”

“No,” Echo admits. “It doesn’t feel that way, most of the time.”

“Are you dreaming?” he asks, brow furrowed. “When you’re like that?”

Echo hesitates again, wary of his questions as she ever is, but there’s something about the look in his eyes—serious, steady—that makes her answer. “I—yes,” she says. “I know something has happened when I wake, but I remember—only fragments, if that.”       

Bellamy nods, thoughtful. “Wish I knew what to tell you,” he says. “But I don’t know if your brain is trying to remember something or to forget, and I don’t know which is worse.”

 _I don’t either_ , Echo almost says, but doesn’t. She’s feeling far too talkative this evening, caught in some strange midnight mood in this blue, glowing room. Something about the shadows under Bellamy’s eyes makes her wonder if he feels it, too. “What about you?” she asks, to divert his attention. “What is important enough on that thing to have you working so late?”

“What, this?” Bellamy says, waving the tablet absently. “Nothing. I’ve been keeping a record of our time here, that’s all.”

“A record?”

“In the old books and movies, they would’ve called it a captain’s log,” Bellamy says, with a wry grin. “Not that I consider myself a captain, and in any case, we’re not going anywhere.”

Echo smiles, though she’s not sure whether it’s at his words or in return to his smile. “So then what is there to record?”

“Not much, other than the results of the day’s card tournament,” he says. He looks away then, putting the tablet on the console beside him. “But I still think it’s something worth having, for when we come down.”

Echo nods. “To show your people.” Since he cannot talk to them, after all, and perhaps won’t be able to for years.

Bellamy’s eyes flick toward her again. “Yours, too.”

“Most of mine don’t read,” Echo points out, and Bellamy half-smiles, giving her a look of tired amusement that she’s slowly growing familiar with.

“Well, we’ll read it to them, then,” Bellamy says. “But five years is a long time. Maybe they won’t even be mine or yours anymore.”

Technically, she no longer has a clan anyway, and he knows that. He’s letting her pretend, though, and she doesn’t know whether to be grateful or demand that he stop sparing her feelings. This whole conversation must be occurring in some other place, some dream, where they can possibly talk this easily. “You said it yourself,” Echo says. “No more sides.”

They haven’t spoken of that day in the woods, when he asked her if she ever got tired of sides. There has never been time to discuss it, nor a reason to. It felt as though they’d made a little progress then—although progress toward what, Echo cannot say—but of course the final conclave ruined whatever it was.

That isn’t true, of course; she ruined it herself. And yet here they are.

Bellamy lifts his arm then, attempting to stifle a yawn. Something tender twists in Echo’s chest. “You should go to bed.”

“You’re one to talk,” Bellamy says, recovering. He rises from the chair, grimacing slightly. Echo springs to her feet before he can offer her his hand. She isn’t sure she could bear that right now.

They leave the room together, as they are headed in the same direction. “What about you?” Bellamy asks, after a few moments of quiet. “Think you’re done for the night?”

“I don’t know,” Echo admits. She probably won’t get much more sleep at all, truthfully; she’s fully awake now, despite the hour. “There’s no way to tell.”

“Well, good luck,” Bellamy says, as Echo stops by her door and he moves toward his own. “See you at breakfast.”

He swipes at the keypad to open the door to his room and steps inside. “Sleep well,” Echo says, and does the same. Although their discussion in the radio room was far from lively, what with both of them exhausted, Echo finds that her room suddenly feels like the quietest place on the ship.

* * *

She doesn’t expect a new pattern to develop.

It takes two nights, but she wakes up on the floor again, her back against the wall like usual. When she opens her eyes, the first thing she sees is the side of Bellamy’s head, bent over the console as usual.

“ _Spichen_ ,” she says without thinking, reaching up to rub her eyes.

“Good evening to you, too,” Bellamy says, without looking up from the tablet.

“What time is it?”

Bellamy taps the screen once. “Fifteen minutes past oh-two-hundred.”

“Late night for you?” Echo asks, grimacing as she reaches up to rub at her neck. The soreness in her muscles must have woken her.

“Not the latest,” Bellamy says, finally looking over at her. “You showed up around midnight. Scared the hell out of me, as usual. I didn’t see you coming this time.”

Two whole hours that she’s been here sleeping, and he didn’t wake her. Instead of meeting his eyes, Echo looks up towards the screens, which span the entire front wall. The Ark is silent and still at this hour; they are almost surely the only ones awake. “You don’t mind it?”

“No,” Bellamy says. “Better to have you here than roaming around wreaking havoc.”

“I haven’t—” Echo begins.

“Relax,” Bellamy says, putting down the tablet and leaning back in the chair to stretch. Echo looks at the screens again, cheeks hot. “I know you haven’t. Yet.”

He’s teasing her, she realizes; how he has any energy with which to tease, she doesn’t know. He looks exhausted—his hair is rumpled, as if he’s been running his hands through it, and the shadows under his eyes are as dark as ever. In the bluish light of this room, it’s almost like they never left the Mountain.

Echo shakes that thought off quickly, as though swatting a fly. Thoughts of the Mountain are for when she’s alone, and even then, only if she must.

“You need to get more rest,” she says.

“I’m fine,” Bellamy says. He gestures at the opposite wall, where the screens reveal no signs of activity. “Besides, who’d keep watch?”

“Funny,” Echo says. “But you are wasting your strength—not to mention your time. Did you forget that it is night on the ground, too?”

Now Bellamy is the one who avoids making eye contact, although his tone is still casual, like they’re only joking. “They’re underground,” he says. “They don’t know night from day any better than we do.”

“Is it that you can’t sleep, or you won’t?” Echo asks. She’s pressing, something she wouldn’t ordinarily do. If Bellamy seeks to weaken himself through sleep deprivation, that’s his choice—but something in her won’t accept that, not right now.

“A bit of both,” Bellamy says. “Since when are you so concerned about my health?”

She’s aware that she hasn’t shown much concern for anything or anyone that wasn’t her people since he’s known her. It has been a conscious choice, one that she hasn’t always been able to stick to where Bellamy is concerned.

“You’re helping me,” she says evenly. “I’m trying to help you.”

He looks at her for a long moment; Echo feels, once again, like a riddle of some kind. “The thing is, I know you’re right,” he says, “which is probably why I’m having a hard time with it.”

“You won’t miss anything,” Echo says. It’s almost certainly the truth, but it is also, she realizes, a placation. She doesn’t have much practice with this. She has served under royalty all her life, and contended with royal egos, but never has she offered advice to someone purely because she cared about them. “I would take your place, but I don’t know how to work the machine.”

“It’s simple enough,” Bellamy says. “You just listen, most of the time. If you listen to the static for too long, though, your mind might start playing tricks on you.”

“I have enough of that already,” Echo says. Taking a gamble, she gets to her feet, then offers him a hand. “ _Reshop_ , _oded_.”

Bellamy sighs, then takes her hand and allows himself to be tugged up from the chair. Echo lets go of his hand quickly, wary of lingering. “I’m going to assume that wasn’t a compliment.”

“It wasn’t,” Echo says. “I called you ‘stubborn.’”

Bellamy rolls his eyes, falling into step with her as they leave the room. “That the worst you can do?”

* * *

She doesn’t expect a new pattern to develop, but it does.

Echo wakes in the radio room again the following night, and again two nights after that. Over the course of the next month, she begins finding herself there at least three or four nights a week. Some nights Bellamy wakes her, usually by gently shaking her shoulder, but only when he cannot keep his eyes trained on the tablet any longer. Most nights, she wakes on her own, sitting on the floor with her back against the wall. It’s wreaking havoc on her back and neck, as well as tarnishing her hope that her night travels will stop anytime soon. She has never been very good at optimism.

“If only I knew why this keeps happening,” Echo says, two weeks after it begins, groggy from sleep and trying to work a crick out of her neck. Her dreams leave her, strangely, with thoughts of trees.

“What, the sleepwalking, or sleeping in the comm room?” Bellamy asks, as he fiddles with one of the dials on the console. It’s loose, and he’s using one of Raven’s screwdrivers to tighten it. “Maybe your subconscious is trying to save me the work of looking for you.”

“Very funny,” Echo says, but she doesn’t laugh. It certainly must have something to do with Bellamy, but she dares not voice what it might be.

As a rule, she avoids analyzing their nightly interactions, particularly during the day cycle. They still sit across from each other at meals, although he will sometimes sit next to her during group card games. He still spends most of his days in the radio room, although Echo occasionally runs into him when they are each employed with some task or errand from Raven or Monty. If anyone has discovered Echo’s nightly wanderings, they say nothing of it, something she is infinitely grateful for. She has only recently grown comfortable with the idea of Bellamy knowing, and even that comfort is tenuous.

She wakes one night standing in the doorway to the radio room, confused and dizzy, as she often is when she wakes standing up. Bellamy has turned in his seat to look at her, one hand braced on the arm of the chair as though preparing to rise to his feet. Echo has a feeling she must’ve said something, although she cannot remember what.

“I was—I don’t know,” she blurts. She meets his eyes, steady and serious—concerned, even.

Bellamy stands and approaches. The distance to cross is short in a room this narrow; he stops about four feet away. “You awake?”

She nods. “I am now.”

“Were you dreaming?” he asks, frowning.

“I think so,” Echo says. Tonight, all she remembers are screams, only some her own. “Did I—make noise?”

Bellamy nods. “You said something, but I’m not sure what it was. You sounded—upset.”

His hesitation makes her wonder if he’d begun to say something else and thought better of it. _Scared_. She must have sounded scared.

Bellamy looks at her for a moment, then steps aside, gesturing toward the row of consoles in front of the screens. “You should sit,” he says. “Want to play cards?”

Echo blinks at him. “Now?”

“It’s only midnight,” he says. “Sit. I’ll be back.”

He leaves, and Echo stands there for a moment, more disoriented by his response than anything else. Once his footsteps recede far enough down the corridor that she can no longer hear them, she moves forward and takes the chair next to the one Bellamy always occupies. She’s never been in this room alone before, or at least not while conscious. The sound of static coming from the radio is a bit grating without someone else there to speak over it.

Bellamy returns a few minutes later, having apparently walked to the mess hall to fetch the deck of cards. He also carries a cup of water, which he offers to her. She accepts it with a nod of gratitude, taking a sip from it as he takes his seat and begins shuffling the deck.

“Go Fish?” he asks, dealing her a hand.

“Sure,” Echo says dryly, accepting the cards he offers. She’s no fool; she recognizes a distraction when she sees one. However, she says nothing else, allowing him to start. He places the rest of the deck on an open spot of the console between them, then looks at his cards.

“Got any twos?” Bellamy asks.

When Echo shakes her head, he says, “You’re supposed to say, ‘go fish.’ The least you could do is get into the spirit of the game.”

“Don’t think you can distract me enough that I won’t notice if you don’t take a card,” Echo says. “Go fish.”

Bellamy takes a card without another word, but he’s smirking. “Got any fours?” Echo asks.

The game continues in this way for several minutes. It’s not riveting enough to really distract her, let alone entertain her, but there is some small comfort to be had in a mindless activity such as this.

"I’d ask if you wanted to talk about it,” Bellamy says after a few turns, “but I know you don’t. Seven?”

“Is this your way of asking without asking?” Echo asks, handing over her seven. This card in particular has been handled roughly over the decades, with a crease down the middle and a piece of one of the corners missing, perhaps torn off by a child’s eager hand. Echo has been attempting to hide it amongst the others in her hand, lest he remember this card from a previous game. “One.”

“You guessed it,” Bellamy says. “Go fish.”

Echo selects another card from the deck—a two, which she knows Bellamy still needs. “What is there to talk about? I told you I don’t remember dreams.”

“You said you remember fragments,” Bellamy points out. “Six?”

Echo shakes her head, and Bellamy takes a new card without bothering to make her say the words. “Screaming,” she says, surprising herself and—judging by the glance he shoots her—Bellamy, too. “That’s what I heard when I woke. Many voices, yelling over one another.”

“Saying what?” Bellamy prompts.

“I don’t know,” Echo says, pretending to look at her cards, but not managing to maintain her casual tone from before. “It might have been—a fight. They were frightened.” _I was frightened_ gets caught in her mouth. She can’t get it out. “Like beasts.”

“Like beasts,” Bellamy repeats, his voice quiet and gruff. “In cages?”

Echo looks up from her cards almost involuntarily. She sees the shadow in his eyes, the shadow that comes from being brutalized, used, reduced to something less than animal, even. At least livestock animals die quickly, one blow and then nothing. Not like the endless, draining torture of the bleedings. He knows.

“Maybe,” she says. “I don’t remember.”

Bellamy looks at her for a moment as if trying to decide whether he believes this. Echo isn’t sure whether she believes it, really. “It’ll come to you,” he says finally. “It’s pretty empty up here, and we’ve all got a lot of time to be alone with our thoughts.”

“And what am I to do then?” she asks, unable to keep the lance of bitterness from piercing her tone. It is her last line of defense against whatever intimacy they have stumbled upon. “If I have a dream that I can actually remember?”

“You deal with it and you live,” Bellamy says bluntly, still meeting her eyes. _No bullshit_ , a phrase she’s heard him direct at Murphy and Emori more than once. “Or you don’t, and you don’t. Now, are you going to take your turn, or not?”

Echo stares at him for a moment, disoriented by him yet again. She’d also forgotten they were even playing a game, and it takes her a moment to remember her next move. “Two.”

“Goddamn it,” Bellamy says, handing over the card, and Echo surprises herself by laughing. It’s a startled, shaky sound, but Bellamy grins back at her anyway.

* * *

One moment, she is standing in the forest. A forest she knows, but at night, any forest can become foreign. The smooth handle of her blade is slick with sweat from her palm. Something rustles amongst the leaves.

“Come on, this way.”

Echo swings without thinking, but her blade vanishes into nothing as she strikes at an unseen opponent. She flails wildly, off-balance. For a moment, she is both in the forest and not, her feet on a sturdy metal floor and her head amongst the trees. She reaches for another weapon, a dagger, anything—

—but finds the movement impeded by Bellamy, his hands gripping her wrists, not allowing her to strike. “Easy, easy,” he says, his voice hushed but urgent. “You’re safe.”

“Bellamy,” Echo says, going slack. She’s not prepared for the relief that crashes into her when she sees his face, the familiar dark eyes and hair and the furrowed brow. They are closer than they’ve ever been—at least, without a cage door between them—and Echo stumbles forward without thinking, her chest against his, her forehead on his shoulder.

Bellamy tenses, and for one horrified second Echo thinks he’s going to use his hands, pinned loosely between them, to push her away. She’s already taking a step back when he speaks. “It’s alright.”

He lets go of her wrists and frees his arms, then embraces her, one arm around her waist and the other around her shoulders. Chaste, but warm, almost easy. Echo can’t remember the last time anyone hugged her, but he’s hugging her now. Some part of her is panicking, saying _back away, back away now before it’s too late_ , but she doesn’t move. Doesn’t want to move.

Echo’s breath levels out fairly quickly—a result of her years of training, mostly, but also of Bellamy’s closeness, the warm, clean scent of him. The solidity of his body keeps her from shaking. “You awake?” he asks after a few moments.

“Of course,” Echo says, voice muffled against his shoulder.

“Told you you’re not supposed to wake a sleepwalker,” Bellamy says, and Echo huffs, too embarrassed for real laughter. She pulls away at last, and Bellamy lets her go. He has the decency to glance away long enough for her to wipe at her eyes.

“I was in the forest,” Echo says, her voice steadier now. The details are already fading, but this much she is sure of. “Someone was following me.” 

“Let’s not talk about this here,” Bellamy says quickly, touching her upper arm lightly as he starts to lead her down the corridor. Echo is more than capable of walking unsupported, and ordinarily would bristle at this treatment, but given the circumstances, it’s better to make haste. They’re in an unexpected area of the ring, not far from Raven’s workshop.

“What’s wrong?” Echo asks, her voice low. “What did I do?”

“Nothing,” Bellamy says. His hand is still on her arm, although it feels less like he’s leading her now that she recognizes where she is. She supposes he must do this—take her by the arm, lead her back to where she belongs—often, often enough that it means nothing to him. For her, though, it’s a novelty. “It’s just—well, Raven’s awake. It’s not even midnight yet, and she practically lives in that lab.”

Echo swallows. “Did she see me?”

“I don’t think so,” he says, “but it was close. I found you wandering around ten feet from her door.”

The thought of anyone seeing her that way has always been enough to chill her, but it’s even worse now. She attacked Bellamy when he woke her—what if she had attacked Raven instead? Raven is fierce, but she isn’t strong enough to fend Echo off. Beyond the physical damage such a blow might cause, what would be the depth of the invisible damage, the trust lost—if there is any to _be_ lost at all?

At some point, Bellamy lets go of her arm, but they are still walking side-by-side. Echo’s feet move without her telling them to; it’s not until they’re long past her door that she realizes they’re headed to the radio room. When they enter, Bellamy must take note of her expression, because he says, “Hey. Sit down, take a breath.”

“I’m fine,” Echo says automatically, although she does sit down. He sits down in his usual chair, his expression serious.

“Nothing happened,” Bellamy says. “And honestly, so what if it had? Believe me when I say Raven knows what it’s like to do things that are out of her control. She’d understand. Everybody would.”

Echo shakes her head. “I could’ve hurt her,” she says. “I could’ve hurt you.”

Bellamy rolls his eyes. “You smacked the shit out of me, but don’t flatter yourself. Besides, I startled you.”

“I’ve been training to fight all my life,” Echo snaps, disliking his dismissive manner. “To _kill_. It’s what I do, even in my sleep.”

Bellamy shakes his head. “You’re not going to kill someone in your sleep, Echo.”

Echo doesn’t hesitate. “And would you bet _your_ life on that?”

He doesn’t match her slight increase in volume, something she finds maddening. “I kind of already have, haven’t I?”

Echo pauses, confused. There’s a hint of challenge in his eyes, like he’s daring her not to believe him. “I mean, I sit in here with you all the time, and you haven’t done anything but drool a little.”

He has a point, not that Echo is about to admit that aloud. If she was going to hurt anybody, she _has_ had plenty of opportunity. “I don’t drool.”

Bellamy raises his eyebrows. “How would you know?”

Echo smiles despite herself, but it’s fleeting. “It doesn’t matter,” she says. “This can’t keep happening. I can’t let it.”

“I can keep a closer eye on the cameras,” Bellamy says. “If it’ll ease your mind.”

“Even you can’t be all-seeing,” Echo says, but she gives him a half-smile so he knows that she’s grateful for this, even if she cannot say it.

“What else is there?” Bellamy says. “We can’t override the keypad on your door and lock you in overnight. That’s a safety hazard in so many ways.”

Echo doesn’t like the idea of being locked in a small room anyways. The thought of not being able to get out, even while conscious, is an unnerving one. “I’ll tie myself to the bed,” Echo says. “My ankles and hands.”

“And have to bite the knots loose every morning?” Bellamy returns, rolling his eyes. “Also a safety hazard, by the way.”

She could also free herself in her sleep; she’s done it before, after all. Then again, she might not be able to sleep at all like that—trussed up like a carcass over a fire.

She could set a trap for herself of some kind—something to fall on her, something to trip over. She could find a way to bar her door, something she hasn’t tried due to a wariness of damaging the tech, which she still knows little about. Bellamy would likely consider both options to be unsafe, in case of a fire or one of the solar flares Raven has mentioned. But by now it seems likely that her unconscious mind is just as crafty as her conscious one, meaning that she will undoubtedly continue to escape unless she can find a way to wake herself up.

In the few seconds of silence while Echo contemplates her options, Bellamy watches her closely. It’s an indication of how preoccupied she is that she almost doesn’t notice. “You said someone was chasing you,” he says. “In the dream. Who?”

“I don’t know,” Echo says. “You know I don’t.” Perhaps if she had been given time to remember, to force herself to hang onto the details, she would know now, but she’d been too worried about getting caught.

Bellamy shakes his head. “Someday, you’re gonna remember,” he says. “You’ll have a breakthrough, or something.”

“Well, when I do, you’ll be the first to know,” Echo says dryly. She owes him that much.

“Yeah, because I’ll be the one who woke you up,” Bellamy says, giving her one of those little smiles of his, the ones that let her know he’s trying to make her laugh. It almost works.

* * *

“ _Yu ait_?”

Echo looks up, almost startled. It might be her native tongue, but she hears Trigedasleng so rarely now that the difference in sound is jarring. Emori watches in the reflection of the mirror she’s cleaning, her eyebrows raised. _You alright_?

“ _Ai ste os_ ,” Echo replies, returning to her scrubbing. _I’m good_. “ _Chomouda_?” _Why?_

“Well, you’ve been scrubbing that tile for about ten minutes now,” Murphy says. When Echo looks at him in mild surprise, he shrugs. “What? I’ve picked up some things here and there.”

“I’ve been teaching you,” Emori corrects, but fondly.

“Just trying to get this spot,” Echo says, waving her rag vaguely to indicate the mark on the floor. The showers are by far the most difficult thing to clean on the Ark, owing to the sheer amount of scrubbing required, but the lack of other work means that even Emori and Murphy are doing manual labor.

“Don’t think that one’s coming up with elbow grease,” Murphy says, walking over on the freshly-mopped tiles to give it an appraising look. “Looks older than us, to be honest.”

“Probably is,” Bellamy says from the doorway, causing both Murphy and Echo to jump, Murphy more noticeably than Echo. Judging by the amused glint in her eyes, Emori must have seen Bellamy coming in the reflection from the mirrors, but decided not to say anything. “You guys about done in here? It’s dinnertime.”

“You know, I was hoping it was the smell of the chemicals making me lightheaded,” Murphy says, moving leisurely back towards the mop bucket.

“Careful,” Bellamy says, raising his eyebrows. “You’ll want to hold onto as many brain cells as you can, Murphy.”

Murphy holds up one of his middle fingers, a gesture that Echo takes for an insult, but Bellamy looks amused, so she says nothing.

It takes them only a few moments to gather their cleaning supplies and return them to the supply closet from whence they came; they’ve worked up an appetite, or at least Echo, Murphy, and Emori have. Emori and Murphy make a beeline for the mess hall, but Bellamy huffs under his breath and pauses to straighten the disarray they’ve left in the supply closet. Echo lingers, though the neatening of the shelves is a task she’d much rather complete later, on a full stomach—or at least a fuller stomach.

Bellamy seems to have wanted her to stay, if the stealthy glance he gives her when he thinks she can’t see is any indication. “I’ve got a temporary fix for your problem,” he says. “Although I don’t think you’re gonna like it.”

“I was thinking about inhaling these fumes until I lose consciousness, see if that changes anything,” Echo says, jostling a bottle of acrid, yellowish floor soap. “I’m sure your idea can’t be much worse.”

Bellamy snorts. “Yeah, I wasn’t kidding about the brain cells. Pretty sure I suffered permanent damage when I worked sanitation.”

Echo holds her hands out briefly. “I’ve suffered some damage of my own. Hopefully not permanent.”

“Jeez,” Bellamy says, catching her by the wrists and lifting her hands as though to inspect them. The skin of her palms and fingertips is slightly pinkened, and tingles to the touch. “We have gloves, you know.”   

“I know,” Echo says, somewhat stunned. She has been trying very hard all day not to think of the previous night, but now, with Bellamy holding her wrists, it’s hard not to. His grip last night had been tighter by necessity, as he kept her from lashing out at him. Today, it’s gentle, the barest clasp of his fingers. “I forgot.”

“You forgot that it would burn you?” Bellamy asks, meeting her eyes. He looks amused, the corners of his mouth twitching towards a smile, and Echo feels something warm and exhilarated uncoiling in her chest.

“It didn’t burn at first,” she points out. In truth, she’d been tired enough to forget, tired enough to go through the motions until the stinging in her hands reminded her that gloves were a necessity for such a task.

“Some things don’t, in my experience,” Bellamy says. “But we can go by medical before dinner, find you some salve.”

He lets go of her hands, and Echo looks away, cheeks suddenly hot as she remembers where they are, _who_ they are. There’s nothing in the closet left to straighten, all the bottles and brooms neatly arranged, and she forces herself not to fidget. “It’s not necessary,” she says. “No sense wasting supplies.”

“You’re probably right,” Bellamy says. “But walk with me anyway.”

His idea, she remembers suddenly. She’d already forgotten. They leave the storage closet and head down the corridor, passing the mess hall doors as they head to medical, a place Echo has seldom visited in the course of their weeks here. “So?” Echo says, when Bellamy doesn’t volunteer anything. “What do you propose?”

Bellamy glances at her briefly as they turn the corner into the infirmary, which is in darkness, filled with empty beds. “That I stay in your room, until you’re ready to admit that this problem isn’t going anywhere.”

Echo goes still as Bellamy turns on the lights and moves towards a wall of cabinets, apparently oblivious to her scrutiny. “Stay in my room?” she says. “As in—share a room?”

“Not exactly,” Bellamy says, examining the contents of a cabinet. “I’d only be there at night.”

“Explain yourself,” Echo says. Her voice has gone funny and tight, and she forces herself to add, “Please.”

“I told you that you wouldn’t like it,” Bellamy says, glancing over his shoulder at her briefly as he moves to the next cabinet. “But I’m not going to let you endanger yourself with some crazy plan to keep yourself from leaving your room at night. Mostly because, if there’s an emergency, I’m going to be the one that has to come rescue you.”

“You won’t have to _rescue_ me,” Echo snaps. Though it wouldn’t be the first time.

Bellamy huffs. “You know what I mean,” he says, still digging through the cabinet. Still not looking at her, which is unusual for him. Perhaps he finds this discussion as uncomfortable as she does—which raises a question as to why he’d even brought it up in the first place. “Besides, it’s temporary.”

“Until when?” Echo says. Forcing herself to move away from the doorway, she investigates a few drawers under a nearby counter. They contain various silvery instruments which she presumes must have some medicinal application, although some of the sharper ones resemble torture devices.

“Until you get over this hang-up of yours and just tell the others that you’ve been sleepwalking.” She can tell he’s facing her now, can feel his scrutiny like the warmth of a fire at her back.

“Never,” Echo says, turning to face him again, her jaw set.

“Fine,” Bellamy says, approaching. It takes only a few of his long strides for him to reach her; she thinks, for one breathless instant, that he’s going to keep coming til he’s close enough to take her into his arms like he had the night before.

He doesn’t, of course. She doesn’t know what she would do if he had. “Tie yourself to your bed, then. You’ll get loose and you know you will. I don’t know how, but you will.”

He holds out his hand; Echo looks down to see a small, battered tube, marked with a label that reads _Burns and Abrasions_. He’s helpfully removed the cap. “Thanks,” Echo mutters, taking the tube.

She squeezes out the barest amount of salve into her cupped hand, a drop smaller than her pinky nail, and hands the tube back to Bellamy. He caps it and returns it to its proper cabinet while she rubs her hands together, the oily nature of the substance meaning even a small amount spreads over her palms and fingers. She watches him, caught between a rush of warmth for him and an answering peal of fear.

Sharing a room with him would not be the hardest thing she’s ever done, not by a long shot, but—it’s _Bellamy_. She already spends too much of her time with him. She trusts him too much. She always has.

“Did you plan to truly stay up all night?” she asks finally. “Watching me sleep?”

“No,” Bellamy says, leaning against the counter below the cabinets, his posture almost too easy. “Glad you think I’m capable of being that creepy, though.”

“ _Shof op_ ,” Echo says automatically, as she is wont to do when someone isn’t taking a situation as seriously as she is. “I just meant—how will you stop me, if I sleepwalk?”

“You’re always up between the hours of eleven and one,” Bellamy says. “So am I.”

“What if I’m not?” she challenges. “What if you fall asleep?”

“The door,” he says. “It squeaks.”

If the squeak of the door is enough to wake him and not her, Echo may scream with frustration. There’s no way around it: she’s going to have to acknowledge the thing she least wants to discuss. “What about the others?” she asks. “They’ll—talk.”

“I figured out how to view the security feed from the tablet last night,” Bellamy says. “To be fair, I’d never tried before, but it’s simple enough. I can keep an eye on who’s in the hallway at night and in the mornings, before I come and go.”

Echo avoids his eyes as she thinks quickly, trying to find a flaw in this. Bellamy really has thought of everything, except for the fact that he’ll surely be uncomfortable sharing a space with her in that way. She’d allowed herself to believe that they were building a friendship, but really, she has no idea how Bellamy feels about her now, whether he values her companionship or even really trusts her. This situation might be an uncomfortable way to find out.

“What about the radio?” she says at last. “I thought you were determined to hear it, if someone reaches us.”

“I told you I knew you were right about the radio,” Bellamy says, his gaze steady. “I guess it’s taken me this long to give it up.”

This startles Echo; admitting defeat is not something she associates with Bellamy. “I didn’t say you should give up.”

“No, but you told me that it was unhealthy,” he says. “And you were right. I’m not giving up on reaching the ground. I just can’t spend every waking moment of the next five years waiting to hear someone on the other end.”

Echo can’t contradict this; it’s what she’d hoped he would come to accept, sooner rather than later. He cannot hope to find fulfillment in these long years by waiting for a signal that may never come. But suddenly she thinks she’ll miss their nights in the radio room, talking or playing cards with the hum of static in the background.

“Look,” Bellamy says, no doubt taking her thoughtfulness in this moment for hesitance. “It was just an idea. We’re not going to do anything you don’t want. But this problem isn’t just going to go away.”

 _This problem_ —not _her_ problem, as he should think of it. That’s what it is, and yet he is willing to not only be her sole confidant, but to help her. “I just—don’t understand why you want to do this,” Echo says finally. “I don’t wish to be any more of a burden than I already am.”

He studies her for a beat, his brow furrowed. “No one thinks you’re a burden,” he says. “I don’t, or I wouldn’t be offering. You know as well as I do that we have to take care of each other up here, and that doesn’t just mean keeping each other alive.”  

Five years in a metal house adrift in an endless void, eating rations and seeing nothing, doing nothing, of lasting importance. It’s a long time in which to lose one’s mind.

“We can try it,” Echo says, hardly daring to believe she’s agreeing to this. “Tonight.”

Bellamy nods. “Alright,” he says. “How are your hands?”

Echo glances down briefly to look at her hands. She’d forgotten about their reason for coming here, too caught up in their words. Her palms are slightly shiny, but instead of the tingle of raw skin, the salve has left behind cool softness. “Fine,” she says. “It really was nothing.”

“I know,” Bellamy says. “So don’t tell anybody we used that stuff.”

His smile tells her he’s joking, and Echo smiles back, even as the mention of the others reminds her that they are supposed to be somewhere else. “We should go,” she says. “They’ll be wondering where we are.”

“Right,” Bellamy says quickly, and he follows when she heads for the door, shutting the lights off behind them on the way out.

* * *

The knock comes late in the evening, after they all went their separate ways when the post-dinner poker game ran well after lights out. Echo gets up from her bed at the sound, her legs stiff from their cross-legged position, and moves on bare feet to the door.

When the door opens with its usual squeaking rattle, she finds herself face to face with Bellamy. He raises his eyebrows at her. “I was worried I’d wake you.”

Echo shakes her head, trying very hard not to be aware of the fact that he’s wearing different clothes—the most threadbare shirt she’s seen him in, and different pants, looser and more worn than the sort he wears during the day. All the clothes look worn-out here, because they are worn-out—but these are different. They’re nightclothes, meant for sleeping, only seen by the most intimate of friends and family. Of course, Bellamy sees Echo in her nightclothes several times a week, depending on her sleep habits on any given night. “I didn’t feel like sleeping.”

“I know the feeling,” Bellamy says. There’s a hole in his shirt, a spot where the circular collar has separated from the rest of the fabric. Echo’s eyes catch on it as she steps aside to let him in. _Mistake_ , she thinks, swallowing hard. _This is a mistake_.

He’s still wearing his boots, which she refuses to find endearing. Echo forces herself not to linger near him as he enters and shuts the door, instead moving back towards her bed, where the book lies open on the blanket. “What’s that?” he asks.

“A book,” Echo says, returning to her seated, cross-legged position on the bed.

He rolls his eyes. “Thanks, smartass. What book?”

Echo checks the cover for the exact title as Bellamy crosses to the other bed. The text hardly shows on the worn cloth blinding. “ _Shakespeare’s Sonnets_.”

Bellamy raises his eyebrows. “Where’d you find that?”

“Harper found it in one of the empty rooms,” Echo says, shrugging. “She said I could borrow it once she finished. She gave it to me this morning, but I’ve only just started.”

Bellamy crosses to the opposite bed and sits down on the edge, facing her. The tablet is in his hands; Echo resists the urge to fidget with the book in hers. “Do you like it so far?” he asks.

“It’s challenging,” Echo says, because he must expect this. She was taught to read English because the Mountain Men still wrote, but her education never covered their poetry. Poetry existed for her people, of course, but only orally. Although, she supposes, the poems of those that came before the first Praimfaiya belong to anyone. “But I don’t mind a challenge.”

“I’ve noticed,” Bellamy says dryly.

Echo smiles despite herself. “The pages are old,” she admits. “And some of the words make no sense. But the rhythm is pleasing.”

“You’ll have to let me borrow it when you’re done, then,” he says. “I’ve read Shakespeare before, but not since I was in school.”

“School,” Echo says, almost amused by the idea. “Those were your lessons? Old poems?”

“We read plays, not poems,” Bellamy says, lips quirked like he wants to smile. “Besides, there's not a lot of reasons for knife-throwing lessons on the Ark.”

“Of course not,” Echo says. “You had guns.”

Now Bellamy does smile, and again Echo feels that warm thing stirring in her chest, the tenderness she has come to associate closely with him. This sets off a brief thrill of panic when she remembers where they are, in her quarters at night, preparing for bed. She cannot entertain such sentiment.

She opens the book, though she knows she won’t be able to concentrate on reading while he’s here, and looks down at the page. After a beat, Bellamy clears his throat, and Echo looks up almost automatically.

“Are you sure about this?” he asks, meeting her eyes.

Echo keeps her expression as impassive as she can. “It was your idea.”

“I was mostly trying to prove a point,” he says. “But, y’know. You like a challenge.”

Echo frowns, realizing she’s being teased. “Go, then,” she says. “If you don’t want to be here.”

“I’m not the one that doesn’t want me to be here,” he says. Now he’s the one with the impassive expression, but the look in his eyes is unaccusatory. He doesn’t want to force her into something she’s not comfortable with, even as he pressures her to admit the truth—that she may never stop sleepwalking, and that someday, one of the others may discover her secret.

Echo blinks. “I—it’s not that I don’t want you here,” she says finally. “It’s just—strange.”   

Bellamy shrugs. “Pretend I’m not here,” he says. “What would you be doing if I wasn’t?”

“Sleeping,” Echo says dryly. “Probably not in my bed, though.”     

“Sleep, then,” Bellamy says. He lifts the tablet to draw her attention to it. “You don’t mind if I work, do you?”

“No,” Echo says, as she rises from the bed to turn down the lights. In the dim orange glow of the emergency lights, Bellamy is almost a stranger. “Not as long as you’re quiet.”

“I’ll try to keep it down,” Bellamy says, and she can almost _hear_ the expression he’s making, that wry little smile he makes when he’s being sarcastic.

Echo returns to her bed and lies down, pulling the blanket over herself. She faces away from him as her eyes adjust, listening as he rustles quietly, taking off his boots and presumably getting comfortable. Silence falls, and the awkwardness is back—at least for her. She can tell by the change of light in the room—it’s suddenly illuminated by a faint blue glow—that he’s begun working on the log, and probably isn’t paying her any attention. She’s been exhausted all day after her poor sleep the previous night, but now that she’s actually lying down, she feels wide awake. Of course.

After several moments of quiet, Echo rolls onto her back. When she speaks, it feels like giving in. “What have you written for today?”

If Bellamy is surprised she’s still awake, he doesn’t let on. “You, Murphy, and Emori cleaned. Raven and Monty made minor repairs to a generator. Harper tended the algae crop. I monitored the comms.”

“That’s all?” Echo asks. She hadn’t expected such a direct list, although she had assumed he would be reporting their daily activities. “You’re tapping a lot.”

“It’s not bothering you, is it?”

“No,” Echo says honestly. The sound of the stylus hitting the screen is actually barely audible unless she strains to hear it. “I’m just curious.”

Bellamy hesitates. “It’s not just a log anymore, I guess,” he says. “Sometimes it’s just my thoughts. You can laugh.”

“Why would I laugh?” Echo asks, frowning at the ceiling. She doesn’t want to roll over and face him, but she can see him in her peripheral vision, his face and upper body illuminated by the glow from the screen. With the light in his eyes, he probably can’t see her well enough to make out her expression. “What are you thinking about?”

“Well, it changes periodically,” he says dryly. After a beat, he continues, his tone more thoughtful now. “It started off addressed to my sister, I guess. Stuff I’d like to tell her, when I can. I started writing to Chancellor Kane. Then I started writing to my people. Pretty soon I wasn’t writing to anybody in particular, I was just writing.”

It makes sense, then, why he’s always writing in his free time. Still, Echo cannot imagine ever having that much to say, let alone to commit to writing. “What do you say to nobody in particular?” she asks.

“I guess I’m figuring it out as I go along,” Bellamy says. “I can read some of it to you, if you’re having trouble sleeping.”

He’s teasing. Echo smiles, and is grateful that he probably cannot tell. “No,” she says. “If you’re going to read it to me, I’d like to be conscious. I owe you that.”

 _And I’d like to hear it_ , she doesn’t say. She’s already revealed too much of herself tonight.

She must fall asleep at some point, because she wakes—somewhat—on her feet. Someone is walking her towards her bed, their arm around her shoulders. It’s dark in the room except for a faint orange glow, but there are no fires here.

“Bellamy?” Her thighs bump the edge of the bed, and she lies down without thinking, her body moving without instruction.

“Yeah, it’s me,” he says. “Go back to sleep.”

When she opens her eyes again, it’s because the lights have reached the brightness of early dawn, or as close as bulbs and wires can ever get. The bed across from her is empty, neatly made; there’s a slight dent in the pillow, where his head must have rested. It’s early enough that Echo doesn’t withhold her smile.

* * *

When the knock comes the following evening, Echo opens the door and immediately steps aside to let him in. Prolonging the inevitable has never suited her.

“Hey,” he says, stepping in and shutting the door behind him as he enters, fingers finding the keypad with the ease of familiarity. “Did I wake you?”

“What do you think?” Echo asks dryly. Behind her, her bed is still made, albeit rumpled from being lounged upon. She didn’t dare fall asleep before he came—if he came.

"Sorry,” he says. “Murphy, Raven, and Emori were still in the mess until about thirty minutes ago. Talking, I guess.”

Of course—he wouldn’t want to risk being seen entering her room. Surely he wants to keep this as quiet as he can, lest the others think he’s begun to lose his mind up here. That’s what Echo would think of him, if she found out he was spending his nights with someone he once considered the enemy. If she wasn’t that enemy.

This can’t go on forever, of course. Someone will notice something, then start asking questions—Raven is a genius, Murphy and Emori are each much cleverer than they let on, and Monty and Harper mean far too well for their own good. It’s that, or someone will catch Echo in the act of sleepwalking, which will also raise questions she isn’t willing to face. They cannot continue in this way for the next five years. Now it’s a matter of time, and a matter of wills—hers, and Bellamy’s.

“Something wrong with my face?” Bellamy asks.

“What?” Echo says, frowning.

“You’re staring.”

He raises his eyebrows at her, as though for emphasis. They’re still standing by the door, although they haven’t been there for more than a few seconds. Echo turns, moves towards her bed, to hide her flush of embarrassment. “Nothing,” she says. “Your face is fine.”

“High praise,” Bellamy says. “You alright?”

“I’m fine,” Echo says, forced to face him as she sits down on the edge of her bed. She is, really. There’s a large part of her that was happy to hear the knock on the door, and happier still to see his face, even if his presence did bring with it a resurgence of the thoughts she’s been trying to ignore all day.

She’s sure if she brought up the subject, he’d assuage her doubts as he had the day before, but she doesn’t. It’s been a long, dull day, and she’s been alone with her thoughts for too long.

“I finished the book today,” she says, before he can ask her any more questions. “ _Shakespeare’s Sonnets_.”

“Really,” Bellamy says, as he moves toward the opposite bed. He sits down on the edge of the mattress as he had the night before, but now he bends down to unlace his boots. “How’d you like it?”

“Well enough,” Echo says. “You can have it now, if you want it.”

She retrieves the book from where she’d left it sitting at the foot of her bed, then leans across the space between their beds to offer it to him.

He takes it, then looks it over, from the faded binding to the yellowed, almost browned, page edges. “Thanks.”

“Just make sure you return it to Harper,” Echo says. “I wouldn’t want her to think I made off with it.”

Bellamy rolls his eyes, but with a sort of amused exasperation, rather than the derision Echo associates with the expression. “Your paranoia never ceases to amaze me.”

“I’m not paranoid,” Echo snaps, even though she knows she is, sometimes, and even though she knows he’s teasing her. “It’s respectful.”

Bellamy’s expression softens slightly, quickly, then goes even once more. “You’re right,” he says. “I’ll get it back to her.”

Echo hadn’t meant to silence conversation completely, but she doesn’t know what to say to smooth over the moment. She feigns a sudden interest in unbraiding her hair, which is still damp from her shower. Without the book in her possession, her room is painfully empty of distractions.

Bellamy opens the book, flips past the blank pages at the front, then frowns. “Please tell me you’re not the one who folded the corners.”

Echo frowns in confusion until Bellamy holds up the book, indicating a crease near the outer corner of a page. “No,” she says. “The pages nearly crumble in your hands as it is. I wouldn’t risk tearing them.”

“Right answer,” Bellamy says, with a grin. “Must’ve been some asshole along the way, I guess.”

Echo smiles, and it’s back, the easiness that sometimes falls between them in moments like this, late in the evening when all they have to occupy themselves with is talk. She’d thought she would miss their nights in the radio room, but it’s not so very different from this. “Here,” she says, tossing him the strip of leather that she uses to bind up her hair. “To spare the book any more harm.”

Bellamy catches it, then shakes his head. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I should let you get some sleep.”

“No,” she says quickly. “Read, if you want to. I don’t mind.”

“You sure?” he asks. “You can sleep under these lights?”

“I’ve slept in trees before,” Echo says. _I’ve slept in cages._ “I think I can manage.”

“I’ll dim the lights, at least,” Bellamy says, rising from his bed to reach the light switch by the door. “Don’t mind me asking, but how does one sleep in a tree?”

“Very carefully,” Echo says. Bellamy adjusts the lighting, lowering it so much that Echo wonders how he’ll be able to see anything at all on the pages. He turns and walks back to his bed, and for an instant Echo feels a strange, lonely ache, as though she’d been expecting him to join her in her bed and he turned away. She swallows hard and moves to get under her blankets, not looking over at Bellamy as he sits on his bed, back against the headboard, and picks up the book.

Ridiculous, of course. He would never do such a thing—nor should she even want him to. She doesn’t want anything to compromise this peace between them.

And it is peaceful, Echo thinks, as she closes her eyes. She cannot see him, but she can hear him every so often, the crinkle of old pages or the rustle of bedsheets. She wonders which poems he finds meaningful, if any. Most of them blur together in her mind, needing further study to be better understood, but Bellamy seems interested in such things. She almost rolls over to ask his opinions, but falls asleep instead.

She wakes early, before the lights have begun their automated sunrise. She’s rolled over in her sleep—or perhaps gotten out of bed and then returned to it at some point during the night—and she can see Bellamy, not yet awake. It’s the first time she’s ever seen him asleep, not rendered unconscious, and the sight gives her pause. He sleeps curled on his side, one arm out, strangely vulnerable as it stretches across the empty space on the mattress. Echo’s eyes, still heavy, fall shut again, but she can just hear the slow, even sigh of his breathing over the hum of the ship.

* * *

After the second time, Echo no longer suffers an internal debate every time she gets up to let Bellamy into her room. There are moments, usually during the work cycle, that those thoughts rise to the forefront of her mind, but she does her best not to dwell on them.

There’s no denying that having him there has had positive effects. She hasn’t woken up alone and outside of her room since they began sharing it, and after two weeks, that’s begun to feel like a massive improvement. She still wakes out of her bed a few nights a week, but always with Bellamy’s hand on her arm, guiding her back.

“You didn’t get out of bed last night,” Bellamy tells her one morning, as they’re both on the way to the mess hall. Echo is newly awake and Bellamy is fresh from a shower. Soap on the Ark is hardly as fragrant as the flower and herb-scented ones she’s used to on the ground, but Echo finds it pleasant enough this morning. “That’s three nights in a row. Four if we’re counting the night where you just sat up for a few minutes.”

“Perhaps I’m getting better,” Echo says mildly. _Perhaps you’re making me better_ , she doesn’t say. _Perhaps you won’t have to do this soon._

“Maybe something triggers it,” Bellamy suggests, as they turn the corner into the mess hall. The dining area is empty; they’re a bit earlier than usual. “Though I guess you would’ve noticed something like that by now.”

“Maybe,” Echo says, distracted by the sound of a rustle in the kitchens.

“Not a morning person, huh,” Bellamy says, as Harper emerges from the kitchens with a cup of water in one hand, the other lifted to her mouth to hide a yawn.

“Morning,” Harper says, yawning again as she passes on her way back out of the mess.

If Harper thinks anything of Bellamy and Echo walking in together, she says nothing. Echo still has low expectations of them being able to manage this for much longer; with just six other people coming and going at any given time, surely they’ve all picked up on each other’s habits. Echo certainly has, although it is in her nature to do so. She knows what time each of them prefers to shower, can identify—if not understand—several of what Murphy calls ‘inside jokes’, and can generally identify who is bluffing at poker. She cannot guess what they may have noticed about her—few people have ever been in such proximity to her for so long.

It’s impossible to know what will happen if someone finds out, but Echo can imagine the embarrassment. Bellamy would tell the truth, she’s sure, rather than let the others believe a lie—and make jokes about it, as they surely would. He would tell them that he’s done this, befriend her so, out of pity, or a sense of obligation, or whatever it is.

But they are friends—Echo is sure of that now. Their nights in the radio room were one thing. She came to him on those nights, in her sleep, and sometimes they talked or played cards. But now he comes to her, every night, and for at least a few moments before bed, they talk, or read, or Bellamy works on the log while Echo darns a hole in the leggings she brought from the ground. Even Bellamy could not tolerate her for so long if he didn’t find some pleasure in her company.

* * *

The weeks pass, and with each one, her sleepwalking becomes rarer. She’s down to one or two nights a week, three at most, by the fifth week of Bellamy’s stay—the tenth week since Praimfaiya.

“It still seems like you’re having bad dreams, though,” Bellamy tells her over a game of cards at the small table in her room.

“How can you tell?” Echo asks. “Four.”

He hands over the card with a slightly irritated look—he’s been after a four for several turns now. “Well, you’ve always kind of—talked, a little bit, especially if I tried to talk to you or rushed you. Last night you didn’t get up, but I heard you mumble to yourself a couple times. You sounded upset. Three.”

“Go fish,” Echo says. She decides to let Bellamy’s comment go without a response; what can she say? All she remembers, like usual, are fragments. The glint of light on metal—not moonlight, the light was too bright for moonlight, and there was no moon—

 _When_ there was no moon, Echo can’t say.

Bellamy picks up another card, adds it to his hand, then says, “It sounded like you were crying.”

He has the decency not to watch her reaction to this, instead looking at his cards for a moment longer before looking up to meet her eyes. “I don’t remember,” Echo says, because it’s true. _I wasn’t crying_ is a denial she cannot make. If he heard it, then she must have been, much as it pains her to think of that.

“Of course you don’t,” Bellamy says, after a beat. “You were asleep. Now, are you going to ask for this two or what?”

Echo swallows her relief at not being pressed further. “I wasn’t,” she says, all thoughts of strategy having left her mind, “but two, please.”

She wins—although it hardly counts, with Bellamy so obviously playing to lose—but she also sleepwalks again. Echo knows she has as soon as she wakes, because she wakes up somewhere she hasn’t in quite some time—the other bed in her room. It’s morning, and Bellamy’s gone. Her own bed is neatly made, which she hopes means that he took her bed instead, although there’s no way of knowing with him gone before she wakes.

Echo meets his eyes several times over breakfast, trying to discern any uncomfortable tension between them, but he doesn’t look anything but slightly tired.

She’s unable to catch his eye after breakfast, so she goes straight to the radio room, only a few minutes behind him. She could wait until tonight to speak with him, and for the sake of discretion probably should, but the embarrassment will eat at her if she doesn’t know—if she isn’t sure—

“What happened last night?” she asks, once she has rounded the corner into the comms center.

Bellamy starts, then gives her a reproachful look as he turns in his chair to face her. “You know, I never want you to creep up on me like that, but especially not this early in the morning.”

Echo takes a deep breath, reminding herself to be patient, emotionless, as she steps further into the room. “Sorry,” she says. “What happened last night?”

“I’m guessing you woke up confused,” Bellamy says, his stern expression softening slightly. “I walked you back to the room last night, and you got in the wrong bed. You’ve done it before.”

Echo nods, swallowing her relief. So she got into his bed while he wasn’t in it. That’s—embarrassing, yes, but not nearly as embarrassing as it could have been. “You should have woken me.”

“No big deal,” Bellamy says. “Not like there wasn’t another available bed.”

There was also an available room, next door, that he could have easily returned to. The fact that he didn’t warms her, somehow. “Well,” Echo says, realizing that she should probably speak, rather than let the silence drag on. “I’ll see you later, then.”

She has already started to make for the door when Bellamy speaks. “You don’t have to go,” he says. “I mean—if you’ve got nothing better to do.”

Echo turns back around, curious. She doesn’t have anything better to do, of course—had it not been for this, she would have been on her way to Raven’s workshop to beg for a task, any task. “And what is it that I would be doing here?”

Bellamy shrugs. “Keeping me company, mostly,” he says. “But I’ve been thinking it’s time to teach you how to use the radio.”

Echo moves forward and sits in the chair closest to his, although it’s not close enough to access the panel of controls he sits in front of without leaning towards him. “I thought you said it was simple.”

“It is,” Bellamy says, rolling his eyes. “Humor me, okay? This room is making me a little claustrophobic today.”

“Claustrophobic?”

Bellamy grimaces briefly, as though he’d forgotten that there are some words her people have lost over the years. “It’s like—when a space is too small, and it makes you feel like you’re going a little nuts. Or a lot nuts, depending on the person.”

Echo nods. “This whole ship makes one feel—nuts.”

Bellamy huffs out a laugh. “Yeah, I can imagine. Not much wide open space here. Except actual space.”

Echo smiles, even though she usually tries not to dwell on the fact that they are currently surrounded by endless nothingness. “So,” she says. “Why have you decided to teach me this today?”

“No particular reason,” Bellamy says, shifting to face the console again. “But you did say you would take my place here, if the need came up.”

Echo nods, although short of collapsing with exhaustion, she cannot imagine what could bring Bellamy to give up control of the radio to someone else—especially if they were able to make contact with anyone on the ground. “I’m willing to swear to it.”

“No blood oaths necessary,” Bellamy says, and Echo rolls her eyes. “So, the computer’s constantly scanning, trying to pick up any kind of chatter, but broadcasting’s set to a default frequency.” He taps a small screen with a series of glowing numbers on it. “If anyone from Skaikru is trying to reach us, they should be listening to that frequency.”

He looks at her expectantly, as though making sure she’s following, and Echo acknowledges him with a nod. “This changes the frequency,” he says, tapping a knob next to the screen with the numbers. “This one’s for volume. There’s a bunch of other settings that affect the power and other systems, but I try not to touch them because I’m kind of winging it here.”

There’s a pause, and then it’s Echo’s turn to look expectantly at Bellamy. “What else?” she prompts.

“Told you it was easy,” Bellamy says. When Echo scoffs, he grins at her, before reaching for the top of the console and picking up a pair of strange earmuffs that are linked to the console by a cord. “Headphones.”

Echo has seen Bellamy wear these often enough, but she still feels a little ridiculous as she puts them on. The headphones are creating static, presumably the same static from the console, only louder. Everything feels a little duller once she has them on, her hearing muted. There’s a little black appendage sticking out oddly from the headphones, adding to the element of ridiculousness.

“Here,” Bellamy says, reaching out with one hand. He bends the appendage until it is closer to her mouth, his fingers briefly close enough to brush her cheek. Echo wills herself not to flush. “The mic.”

“What is this for?” Echo asks. Even her own voice is slightly muffled by the static in her ears. “To hear my voice?”

“Yeah,” Bellamy says. He points to a small red button below the frequency knob. “You push this button right here, and then you can talk. Push it again when you want to stop.”

Echo nods, then watches as Bellamy presses the button, which glows red. He raises his eyebrows at her. “Hello,” she says.

Something about this must amuse him, because she can tell he’s trying not to laugh. “Please, go on.”

Echo does not enjoy being laughed at, as a general rule; she rarely tries to be funny, and thus she assumes any laughter she induces is likely at her own expense. But it feels good to make Bellamy laugh, and it _is_ funny, in a hopeless sort of way—calling _hello_ into a little black mouthpiece, hoping that someone will speak into her ears. It’s like shouting across a ravine, waiting for someone to answer from the other side.

“This is Echo,” she says, “kom Azgeda. If you can hear me, _hola au_.”

“You’re a natural,” Bellamy says dryly.

“You said it wasn’t hard,” Echo points out, grinning at him despite herself. She has used Skaikru radios before, of course, but those were only good on the ground, for distances coverable by people. She’s talking from the _sky_. She’s the first, and as yet the only, of her people to ever do so. She is not immune to the quiet magnitude of such an act.

“No, I really think communications is your calling,” he says, still joking. His eyes catch on hers for a moment, and he seems to hesitate, before his expression finally sobers. “It’s too bad nobody heard that.”

Echo feels her own smile fade. “Why not?”

Bellamy shrugs, a subtle lift of his shoulders, before reaching out to press the red button again, returning it to its normal, unlit state. “Even if we were getting a decent transmission out of this place—which we’re not—the ionization in Earth’s atmosphere means no signal can make it through. We can shout into the void all we want, but they can’t hear us, and we can’t hear them.”

“Bellamy,” Echo says, speaking and moving instinctively—she reaches out and touches his hand where it rests on the console, lightly curling her fingers around his loose fist. As soon as she does it she thinks of pulling away, a thrill of something like adrenaline shooting through her, but even she—unpracticed as she is in the ways of friendship—knows that would be the most awkward way to handle it. They’ve touched before. It’s nothing to be afraid of.

“Yeah?” Bellamy says, his gaze flicking from their hands to her eyes.

Echo swallows, steadying herself. “I know you have doubts,” she says. “Believe me, I understand. But you are stronger than your doubts. Act like it.”

Bellamy’s brow furrows. “I know,” he says. “It’s just . . .” He shrugs again, as though the sentence is not worth finishing. Perhaps it isn’t. He still hasn’t moved his hand, though.

“It’s a test,” Echo says firmly. “You told me that we would be tested. Every day, for the next five years.”

Bellamy’s mouth twitches, like he wants to smile. “Is throwing my own words back at me one of your special skills?”

“They’re good words,” Echo says, raising her eyebrows at him. On a whim—maybe she’s still trying to make him feel better, or perhaps she just wants to do it—she lets go of his hand then, reaches for the red button, and presses it.

“ _Osir laik Echo kom Azgeda en Belomi kom Skaikru_ ,” she says, into the microphone. “ _En osir ste set yu op_.”

Bellamy’s nose scrunches thoughtfully. “I got some of that,” he says. “The obvious parts. But you lost me towards the end.”

“We are Echo of Azgeda and Bellamy of Skaikru,” Echo says. “And we’re listening.” Not a perfect translation, lacking a bit of nuance, but close enough.

Bellamy smiles, then, and the look in his eyes reminds her of that feeling she gets sometimes around him, that gentleness she doesn’t dare name. “Good words.”

* * *

Raven appears in the afternoon—or what should be afternoon—seeking help stripping metal paneling from the walls of an unused storage closet; Echo joins her, though Bellamy does not, thanks to the already cramped nature of a storage closet with just two people working in it. The work goes more quickly than it would have on the ground, with electrically-powered machines to draw screws from the walls, but it still takes them until nearly dinnertime to finish.

“Alright,” Raven says, as Echo lifts the last panel and places it onto the pile they’ve made. “Now we’ve got a big-ass pile of scrap metal, if it ever comes down to that.”

Her tone is sarcastic, and it makes Echo smile as she returns the drill to Raven, who shoves it back into a cramped toolbox from her workshop. Raven puts on a brave face, but she—like any of them—is doing whatever she can to pass the time. “When you have limited options, all work is good work.”

“You’re like a walking proverb machine,” Raven says, grinning as she closes the toolbox. She stands before bending over to grab the handle on the toolbox lid. “What’ve you got about idle hands?”

“I’ll get that,” Echo offers, gesturing to the toolbox. “To your workshop?”

“Don’t worry about it,” Raven says, her voice even, but the look in her eyes firm. “I got it—”

A sound cuts Raven off—an eerie crackling noise that Echo has heard before, when the Mountain Men made announcements. “Solar flare alert,” announces a woman’s voice. “A class-X solar flare . . .”

“Oh, come _on_ ,” Raven groans, and Echo instinctively focuses on her rather than paying attention to the rest of the announcement—she trusts Raven’s opinion far more than some unknown voice. “This is typical.”

“Typical?” Echo repeats, though not out of lack of understanding of the word. The woman speaking from the ceiling repeats her directions for them to take shelter. Echo has only heard Raven mention solar flares once, during the first several days of their time on the Ark, and all she’d said then was that they would possibly have to evacuate their rooms for the duration of the flare.

“Well, not really,” Raven says, letting go of the toolbox and straightening up. “It’s a class X, and none of us really need another dose of radiation, so we’d better get moving.”

A dozen questions come to mind, most of them centering on radiation—a dirty word, as far as Echo is concerned—but Raven starts walking before Echo can ask any of them, leaving the toolbox and the closet behind. Echo follows as, overhead, the same message repeats again and again, something she finds vaguely unsettling. “Where are we going?”

“You can head on to the flare shelter,” Raven says. “It’s just past medical—go where everyone else is going. I’m going to a computer, check the readouts.”

They find Bellamy waiting at the door to the radio room, his brow furrowed. “I figured you guys would be headed this way,” he says, in answer to Echo’s questioning look. “Sensors are going nuts.”

He directs this last bit at Raven, of course, as she slips past him into the radio room; Echo can see her bending over to press buttons at the computer two consoles away from the one Bellamy usually sits at.

Bellamy stays where he is. “Hey—are you okay?”

Echo realizes she’s been staring at the computer screen in front of Raven for several seconds, although she’s too far away to read anything and the small, flashing pictures make no sense to her. She tears her eyes away and looks, instead, at Bellamy. “Raven said—are we going to get sick?” she asks, before she can stop herself. “From the radiation?”

“What?” Bellamy says, surprised. “No. Nobody’s getting sick.”

Echo looks into his eyes, searching for some sign that he’s lying to her, trying to spare her feelings, but she finds none. “I just—I thought that—” she says, quickly but with a touch of chagrin now, the urge to suppress her fear coming swift and powerful.

“The flare isn’t close enough to hurt us, not like the death wave,” Bellamy says. “This is more of a precaution than anything.”

Echo nods. “And the Ark—”

“—will be fine,” Bellamy says. “My sister survived solar flares just fine by hiding under the floor. We’ll be okay.”

Echo nods, unwilling to press any further, although the ball of unease that spawned in her stomach a few moments ago has yet to dissipate completely. Overhead, the voice continues to repeat itself. “Go on ahead to the flare shelter,” Bellamy says, his voice low and calm. “The others should be headed that way, if they’re not already there. Raven and I are going to make sure everything’s running like it should be and then we’ll come, too.”

Echo nods, breaking eye contact quickly. She’s already embarrassed herself enough, and the flare has only just begun—she won’t embarrass herself further by asking to wait with him and Raven, where she feels safest. Echo turns and heads down the corridor toward medical without another word, and she hears Bellamy step into the radio room and say something to Raven as she goes.

As Raven said she would, Echo finds the flare shelter just past the infirmary. The room is large, clearly meant to hold dozens of people at once, and empty of furniture. Monty, Harper, Emori, and Murphy are all already there, seated on the floor in a loose cluster. They’ve got their dinner trays in front of them, and someone has brought in three extra trays, one each for Raven, Bellamy, and herself.

“Have you seen Raven and Bellamy?” Emori asks, looking up at Echo. She seems to be handling this well, her expression calm, though the interest in her voice implies concern.

“They’re on their way,” Echo says, forcing herself to stand near the group. She has to push down the urge to pace back and forth. The space is easily large enough to allow it, but she does not want to expose her nerves for all to see. “They’re checking the computers.”

Overhead, the alarm suddenly cuts off, and Murphy sighs. “Thank fuck. If I never hear her voice again, it’ll be too soon.”

“Well, she’s the one who’s going to tell us the flare’s over,” Monty points out. “So the sooner, the better.”

“How long will that be?” Echo asks.

“No way to know. They’re usually pretty short—an hour or two—but there have been some lengthy ones before,” Monty says. “The longest I can remember was six hours.”

“I remember that one,” Harper says, wrinkling her nose. “My dad kept trying to make me play word games with him to pass the time, but I just wanted to go back to bed.”

Six hours or longer in this room, waiting for it to be safe enough to leave—at least she’s not alone, or she might go mad in here.

Raven enters the room then, followed closely by Bellamy. “Oh, good, you guys brought food,” Raven says, joining the group without hesitation. She eases herself to the ground, sitting next to Emori, and reaches for an unclaimed tray.

“It was my idea, for the record,” Murphy says.

"Well, you know what they say about broken clocks,” Raven says, grinning at him. “Echo, you might as well sit down. We’re not going anywhere, for now.”

Echo sits down on the floor next to Raven, but her eyes are on Bellamy; he drags the thick metal door shut, then presses a button on the keypad. Something groans and thuds, like the usual sound of an Ark door locking, only louder and heavier.

He turns to face the group and meets Echo’s eyes. “The door’s specially sealed,” he explains. “To protect us. The walls, too.”

He must be able to tell that she’s still uncomfortable, if he’s explaining such things to her without even being asked. Echo nods once, then looks away, wary of letting someone else notice her concern. She’s embarrassed herself enough as it is.

Bellamy sits down between Echo and Harper, rounding out the circle. He takes a tray, and Echo follows suit, although she’s lost most of her appetite. “We were just talking about that six-hour flare,” Monty says. “What was that—six years ago?”

“I remember that one,” Raven says. “I couldn’t find my mom. Actually, nobody could find my mom.”

Emori frowns. “Where was she?”

“She went to a shelter in another station,” Raven says, shrugging. “Who knows why.”

“I got separated from my parents once during a flare,” Monty says, sympathetic. “A short one, though. Only like forty-five minutes.”

“I don’t know how you guys remember this shit,” Murphy says, leaning back languidly to rest his weight on his palms. “They all blur together for me.”

“Well, that’s not surprising,” Bellamy says. Murphy rolls his eyes, but looks vaguely amused. “Did one of you grab the deck of cards on your way here?”

“Sorry, Emori and I were a little busy carrying trays for all of your ungrateful asses,” Murphy says.

“I said thank you,” Harper says, miffed. “And so did Monty.”

“Thank you both,” Bellamy says dryly. “Well, let’s hope this is a short one. Although there’s always word games to keep us busy.”

Harper groans. “I _hate_ word games.”

Echo doesn’t know whether to be relieved or reluctant when the conversation moves away from past solar flares, but eventually she settles on relief. Although she still has questions—why do the flares occur at all, and what happens if the alarm doesn’t work—she’s undoubtedly better off keeping her mind off it. She shoves down all thoughts of the situation at hand—especially thoughts of radiation, leeching in through cracks in the walls, sinking into her flesh. The burns on her cheeks from Praimfaiya, long healed into faint white scars—the closest thing to ritual scarification she’ll ever have—itch, but she does not scratch them.

She must be being quieter than usual, because Bellamy looks over at her once or twice, quick little glances when he thinks she isn’t looking. She doesn’t say anything about it, and she can’t know for sure if he did it for her, she is quietly grateful that he changed the subject, anyway.

* * *

 

It takes two hours for the woman’s voice to return, telling them the danger has passed and that they may now go about their business. It’s not long after lights out, but they all go their separate ways, yawning and quiet. One thing their time on the Ark has taught Echo is that doing nothing can sometimes be just as draining as a day’s labor.

Echo returns to her room after her nightly shower and dims the lights slightly, leaving the door unlocked for Bellamy before she gets into bed. She plans to wait up for him, as she usually does, but she hopes he doesn’t want to talk about the flare. She’s not in the mood to stir up those thoughts again, even under the guise of easing her worries. It’s over. She must let it be over.

She’s not sure how much time passes as she lies there, waiting for him, waiting for something, but eventually, she’s not there at all anymore. The walls are trees, the floor solid, unmoving earth. The darkness is unremitting.

She rouses slightly when someone says her name, but she is caught between two worlds, sleep and reality, the sky and the ground, Bellamy and herself. She is standing in the middle of the room; she is standing in the forest, _too close_ , in dangerous territory. When he moves forward to touch her, perhaps to guide her back into bed, she cannot distinguish between Bellamy and the _Ripa_ , two sets of strong hands reaching out for her—

“Echo!”

The scream breaks off into a gasp— _no_ , and then nothing, just as it had that night. Echo stumbles backwards, disoriented, but she knows where she is now. On the Ark, in her room, with Bellamy. As safe as she can be, in the sky.

“Bellamy,” she says, her voice shaking. He stands before her, hands raised to his chest and spread, defensive. “Did I hit you—I’m sorry.”

“You didn’t hit me,” he says. “Are you alright?”

She nods. Her whole body is shaking, and she wants, very badly, for him to embrace her—like he did that other night, weeks ago now, when he woke her up by accident much like tonight. “I’m fine,” she says. “I know. I know what I’ve been dreaming about.”

Bellamy moves closer, lowering his hands. “You remember it?”

Echo shakes her head. “No,” she says. “Not the dream. But I know what it was. All this time, it’s been the same thing, the same night—”

Bellamy holds up his hand suddenly, as though to silence her. “Footsteps,” he says. “In the hallway.”

Echo falls silent, and within seconds, someone knocks on the door. “Echo?” Emori says. “ _Yu ait_?”

Bellamy opens his mouth, as if to speak, but Echo shakes her head quickly. “ _Ai ste os_ , Emori,” she calls back, her voice hoarse. “ _Mochof_.”

More footsteps. Echo curses under her breath. Another time, she might find their concern touching, but she’s pulled Emori and now at least one other from their beds. “What’s going on?” Raven asks. Then, louder: “Echo, are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” Echo says, sidestepping Bellamy and approaching the door so that they can hear her better. She won’t open the door, lest Bellamy be foolish enough to show himself. “I—had a nightmare. I’m alright now.”

A slight pause. “Alright,” Raven says, her tone more than slightly disbelieving. “Let us know if you need anything.”

Echo winces. Too kind, by far. “Thank you,” she says. “ _Reshop_.”

Raven murmurs a good night, then shuffles away. Judging by the silence that falls, Emori has more than likely already returned to her room. Echo waits a moment, in case anyone else comes to check on her, then turns to face Bellamy again. He’s watching her closely, his brow furrowed.

“Are you okay?” he asks.

“Stop asking me that,” Echo says, but it’s too heavy to be a real rebuke. She moves past Bellamy, though something in her still aches to be held, and sits down on the edge of her bed. She puts her elbows on her knees, resting her weight on their sharp points, as Bellamy sits on his own bed, facing her. Her hands are still trembling.

“It was the night I was taken into the Mountain,” Echo says, before he can ask. “That’s what I’ve been dreaming of.”

Bellamy doesn’t look surprised. Even Echo is not surprised. “Every night?” he asks.

“Every night I’ve been out of bed, I suppose,” Echo says. “Every night I relived it.”

The lights are still low, but she can read his expression even in the dimness. He looks expectant, calm, his shoulders hunched, hands clasped in front of him—almost mirroring her posture. Braced, for whatever she’s about to say next. “Well,” Bellamy says. “What happened?”

Echo swallows. “I’ve never—I haven’t thought about it much since,” she says, which is not entirely a lie. She has done her best not to think of that night, although she has not always been successful. Why relive the mistakes that got her taken when she managed to survive the Mountain in the end? She told only Queen Nia what had happened, and even then, all she could do was beg forgiveness for her absence—forgiveness that she, then weak and sick, had considered herself fortunate to be granted.

It seems fitting, though, that Bellamy be the one to hear the retelling of events. Without him, of course, she would not be alive to tell the tale.

“I was sent on a scouting mission,” Echo says, licking her lips. Her throat and mouth have gone oddly dry. “Scouting Skaikru land. Queen Nia distrusted what information we had, because all of it came from Trikru.”

Bellamy’s mouth twists. “Sounds about right.”

Once, she would not have let this jab at her queen go unchallenged; now, she has only the strength for forging ahead. “I rode at night,” Echo says. “Nia did not wish me to be seen. That was often my task—to go unseen.” 

Echo pauses briefly, wondering if Bellamy has a sarcastic reply for this, too, but he says nothing. “But I had been up since before dawn, first attending the queen and then traveling. I was tired. My horse was tired. There was no moon that night—I could get close that way, close enough to slit a throat, but even a spy can’t see in the dark. I decided to rest, and then, before dawn—when those of you that were awake would be at your least observant—I would find a place to hide and observe your camp.”

“You could’ve gotten in,” Bellamy says wryly. “We were—babes in the woods. Somewhat literally.”

Echo huffs out a laugh despite herself, but it’s a shaky, disbelieving thing. “I would have,” she says. “But I never even made it to sleep.”

It’s likely that she would have seen Bellamy, if she had been able to complete her mission. Would it matter if she had? She would not have known, by looking at him, what he would one day come to mean to her. She didn’t know when she saw him in the cage. She spat at him, her enemy, and he saved her anyway.

“My horse smelled them,” Echo says. Her voice cracks; what she wouldn’t give for some water. “Or heard them. Maybe both. I don’t know. I had to quiet her, but I knew something was wrong. I knew it was a risk, stopping in those lands, but I thought it must be one of your people. I thought I could fight them.”

Again, Bellamy says nothing. She wishes he would. She wishes he would say anything, one of his jokes to lighten the mood, even another cutting remark about Azgeda. “Then I smelled them,” Echo says. “I think I knew, then. When I smelled the rot.”

She has seen death, of course; she’s caused it, more times than she could count, if she so desired. She’s even smelled it, the metallic scent of blood, charred flesh on a funeral pyre. But Reapers smelled of old death—decaying flesh, bodily fluids. She’ll never forget the smell, because a bit of it lingered in the Mountain, from all those lives lost.

“I tried to light a torch, but there was no time. I reached for my sword, tried to run, but one grabbed me from behind. He must’ve been twice my size, and grunting at me, like an animal.”

Echo meets Bellamy’s eyes for the first time in a while; without noticing, she’s let her gaze drift to a spot over his shoulder, on the opposite wall. It seems important, somehow, that she see the look on his face when she tells him this. “I panicked,” she says, the word like a forbidden curse in her mouth. “I screamed—started running—but I knew there were more of them, waiting. That scared me even worse.”

Bellamy’s expression betrays nothing. “And then?”

“I don’t know,” Echo says. It’s something of a relief, strangely enough, to reach a part of this story that she doesn’t remember in excruciating detail. “They must have knocked me unconscious, because I woke up in the Mountain, naked, being sprayed with water.” She pauses. “You must know the rest.”

Bellamy’s voice is grim. “I’ll never forget.”

“I can’t,” Echo says, surprising even herself with her honesty. “Try as I might.”

"You must have been in there for weeks,” Bellamy says, his voice softer now. He’s still looking at her, his gaze unflinching. “No wonder you can’t get it out of your head.”

Echo can’t seem to stop talking now that she has begun; it’s like a dam has burst, like everything she has never spoken of is now rushing to get out. “It’s weakness,” she says. “The dreams. The sleepwalking. Weakness. I was afraid that night, and I am afraid here. I don’t know how to not be.”

“Hey,” Bellamy interjects. His hand twitches, like he wants to reach for her, to touch her hand as she had touched his that morning, but the space between their beds is too wide. “You’re not weak, okay? You’re not weak for being scared. You want to know what I think?”

“I’m sure you’ll tell me anyway,” Echo says, but there’s a hollowness to the words that she doesn’t intend.

“I think you don’t like feeling out of control,” Bellamy says. “Whether that means you’re afraid or not, whatever. You don’t feel safe here, so your mind keeps taking you back to that night, because the Mountain is the only place you’ve ever been where you weren’t the most powerful person in the room.”

“I’ve never been the most powerful—” Echo interrupts, almost instinctively. She has been an adviser to royalty, but ultimately never more than a servant, subject to the whims of her sovereign—

“Yes, you have,” Bellamy says sharply, “and you know it. You’re a warrior, a spy. Strong and smart, and a dozen other things besides. They almost took that from you, but they didn’t—couldn’t. Nobody can.”

Echo swallows, though her throat is suddenly tight. She knows that Bellamy thinks she’s strong—he’s told her as much—but to think he might have more words to describe her, positive words, is an oddly heady thing. “How do I make it stop, then?” she asks, once she’s regained the power of speech. “The dreams.”

“You don’t,” Bellamy says. “It’s like I told you. You deal with it, and you live. There’s no magic fix for our demons, much as I’d like there to be.”

Of course he still feels that way. He has demons of his own, things that keep him awake at night, things that were done to him, things he’s done. Echo feels a restlessness building even as she knows that Bellamy’s right, an edginess that words can’t quite fix. “So what? Just keep going like this, and hope it eventually stops?"

“I guess so,” Bellamy says, shrugging. “Maybe one day, you’ll feel safe here. You’re already doing better than you were. Give it time, Echo.”

Time—he’s reminded her of the hour, albeit unintentionally. How many minutes have passed, while she told him her story? It feels like hours. “It’s late,” she says, after a moment’s pause. “I’ve kept us both up—you should get some rest.”

“We don’t have to sleep, if you don’t want to,” Bellamy says. “We can play cards, or something. You owe me a rematch.”

Echo opens her mouth, a _yes_ resting on her tongue, then closes it. She doesn’t have the patience for cards right now—which almost certainly means she doesn’t have the patience for sleep, but she can pretend, for Bellamy’s sake. “Perhaps not,” she says. “I’m afraid my strategy would be weak tonight, anyway.”

“Then it’s the perfect time for me to strike,” Bellamy says, but he doesn’t press any further, just shifts back onto his bed, resting his back against the headboard.

Echo lies down, pulls the tousled sheets over herself, and shuts her eyes. Sleep does not come, and likely will not come—she is wide awake, almost unbearably so. Minutes pass. Something metal creaks; she cannot hazard a guess as to the origin of the noise. Next to her, only feet away, Bellamy sighs.

Something about that sound—quiet, unquestionably human—propels Echo upward, first into a seated position and then to her feet. Bellamy looks up from the tablet, his brow furrowed. “Echo?” he says, cautious.

“I’m awake.”

“Okay,” he says, slowly. “Then what are you doing?”

“I don’t know,” she admits, then suppresses a wince. “You said—we could play cards.”

He’s still looking at her, but his expression is no longer cautious—instead, it’s thoughtful. The bluish glare of the tablet casts shadows across his face that she’s not quite familiar with. Echo knows her own face must be easy to read, even in the semidarkness. Something in her is saying _please_. “Do you really want to play cards?” he asks.

“No,” she admits. She takes a small step forward, towards him, unsure. He leans to one side, reaching down to put the tablet on the floor next to his bed, and then scoots over, closer to the wall. Making room.

He does not protest when she lies down on the bed next to him. The bed is so small that they couldn’t avoid each other even if they tried, but Bellamy reaches for her, as easily as if she had asked him to do it. It’s even easier, somehow, to lean in when he pulls her close, to wrap her arms around him in return, to tilt her head up and kiss him.

After all their talking, perhaps she would have expected there to be more now—had she dared to think of this—but there seems to be no need. It’s easy, so easy, to let Bellamy pull her on top of him, to straddle his hips and let him peel off her shirt, then his own, then her leggings, then his pants, which get tangled somewhere around their feet. It’s the easiest thing in the world to slide down onto him, rock up and down, hide her panting breaths behind a hand. He’s got one hand on her thigh, the other in her hair—which must be tickling his face and chest, though he doesn’t complain—and when she comes, his grip tightens momentarily, like he needs to hold onto something even more than she does.

He speaks only once, moments later, his jaw tight—“Echo.”

She doesn’t have to be told to ease herself off of him—this practice is common enough on the ground, where there is nothing to keep babies from being made but good timing and luck. She’s not sure what he expects, but he tenses when she takes him in hand, his pulse heavy when she kisses his neck, his groan soft when he hides it in her hair.

She stays on top of him for a few moments, hardly daring to move, although the heat between them grows bothersome. Finally, Bellamy speaks, his mouth still touching her hair. “Feel free to wipe your hand on the blanket,” he says. “It’s due for a wash anyway.”

Echo wrinkles her nose, but does as he suggests; something about this makes Bellamy huff, amused, although he tries to stifle it. One of his hands moves to the small of her back and settles there for a moment, as though with fondness.

Echo thinks of getting up and fetching the clean blanket from her bed, but she’s unsure if she’ll be invited back if she leaves. After a few moments, Bellamy wordlessly kicks the blanket off the bed, then tugs the thick sheet up over them. With their combined body heat, it’s not too bad—and anyway, Echo has survived nights far colder than this.

She doesn’t want to think about that, though—not anymore, not tonight. Bellamy comes to rest on his side, his back against the wall, while Echo lies on her back next to him. After a few seconds, she realizes that he’s watching her, but she’s not sure what—if anything—she ought to say.

“Well?” he says finally, before turning his head to the side, stifling a yawn against his shoulder.

“Well, what?” Echo says, looking over at him. “Are you expecting praise?”

Bellamy snorts. “No,” he says, “but now I’m a little concerned.”

Echo suppresses a smile. “Don’t be.”

“You’ll make me blush,” Bellamy says. She can hear the eye roll in his tone, though it is dark enough that she misses the actual gesture. “Anyway. You just—seemed a little stiff, I guess.”

She knows what he wants to ask, and for once thinks she might actually know the answer. “I’m alright,” she says. “Are you?”

“Yeah,” he says, muffling another yawn. He shifts then, putting his hand over her ribs. When she doesn’t protest, he shifts again, this time resting his arm across her midsection. Despite the weight, Echo feels lighter, somehow, than she has in a long time.

She’s not sure of the exact moment that Bellamy drops off into sleep, but his breathing slows, goes heavy and deep. She feels less restless than before, having worked off a fair amount of energy, but sleep is still slow to come. Strangely enough, she doesn’t mind. She lets her arm rest over Bellamy’s, counts the exhales that tickle her neck and shoulder, ever so slightly, strokes his forearm when he squirms in his sleep. Guarding his sleep, almost—repaying a favor long overdue.

* * *

Echo wakes early the next morning, jostled awake as Bellamy attempts to get up without waking her. She allows him to think he’s succeeded for a moment, listening with her eyes closed as he scoots gingerly to the foot of the bed, gets up, and starts rustling around for his clothes. A moment later, he comes close to the bed again, bending down to retrieve the tablet. The lights have only just begun to rise, and for a split second, before she opens her eyes fully, Echo can almost pretend dawn is coming.

“Hey,” Bellamy says, once he notices that her eyes are open. “Didn’t mean to wake you.”

“It’s alright,” Echo says, making no effort to sit up.

“This thing’s dead,” Bellamy says, waving the tablet. “Guess I’ll have to make a break for it.”

“Good luck,” Echo murmurs.

Bellamy huffs at her, whether fondly or exasperatedly, she can’t tell—but the touch he gives her as he walks away from the bed, the slightest brush of fingers against her bare arm, is enough to make her substantially more alert. He smiles back at her, like that was his intention, and keeps walking.

Once Bellamy slips out the door, Echo dozes for a few moments, until the lights have risen enough that she can play at sleep no longer. She has rarely had such opportunity for leisure in her life; she’s been rising at or before dawn for as long as she can remember. On the Ark, idle hours are more of a bane than anything, because they are so numerous. But this—dreamless, quiet peace—is rare. She allows herself to wish, briefly, that Bellamy could have stayed to indulge in it with her, before burying the thought as she rises. It’s a thought for later, perhaps, when the lights are out once more.

She dresses, then takes Bellamy’s blanket and sheets down to the laundry room, which at this hour is empty and silent. One of the few things Echo genuinely prefers about life on the Ark is the ease of simply putting ones’ belongings into machines to be washed and dried, rather than washing them by hand and hanging them to dry.

The mess hall is also empty when Echo makes her way there, although within a few minutes, Harper has arrived, drowsy as usual in the mornings. Monty follows, then Raven, then Bellamy, dressed in fresh clothes and damp-haired from a shower. Murphy and Emori bring up the rear, as they are wont to do in the mornings.

Conversation is slow for the first few minutes of breakfast, as everyone makes their own progress towards full awareness. After ten minutes of nothing but quiet murmurings, Echo is surprised to hear herself spoken to. “Did you sleep okay, Echo?” Raven asks, her expression thoughtful.

After everything else that happened, Echo had forgotten—she woke Raven last night, and Emori, too, by crying out. She told them she’d had a nightmare. Raven is watching her, clearly expecting a response, and there’s no time to come up with anything else besides, “Yes. It was nothing.”

“It didn’t sound like nothing,” Raven says, frowning. “You scared the hell out of us.”        

Echo resists the urge to look away, down at her plate, or worse—at Bellamy. “My apologies,” she says. Giving apologies—strangely enough—is becoming another task that Echo finds easier up here, in addition to simpler ones like laundry. She’s not sure what exactly that says about life in the sky. “I didn’t mean to disturb anyone.”

“No need to be sorry,” Raven says. “We’ve all got nightmares. Just wanted to make sure you’re okay.”

At the other end of their small group, Harper turns to Monty. “I knew I heard something last night.”

Monty shrugs. “I said I believed you.”

“What about you, Bellamy?” Murphy says, raising his eyebrows. “Hear anything? It’s just that rushing in heroically seems like one of your things, is all.”

Bellamy looks up from his plate, brow furrowed. It’s just another joke from Murphy, their usual routine, but Echo can see it in the instant before he opens his mouth to retort—he glances toward her, whether intentionally or unintentionally, before he prepares to lie for her. To lie _about_ her to his friends, as she’s asked him to do.

Echo opens her mouth, hardly aware of what she’s going to say until she speaks, and says, “He’s been helping me.”

Now everyone’s eyes are on her, including Bellamy’s. Aware that she will struggle to control her facial expressions if she says this while meeting Bellamy’s eyes, Echo lets her gaze skip away from him, instead looking at Murphy, who looks—as usual—as though some detached part of him finds this all very amusing. “I’m—prone to sleepwalking. Bellamy makes sure I don’t . . .”

 _Hurt myself? Hurt one of you?_ Some part of her is panicking, having finally arrived at the point she swore she would never reach, but she can’t turn back now.

“Get into any trouble,” Bellamy finishes. Echo’s gaze flicks to him again, this time unintentionally. He’s not smiling openly, but she can see the warmth in his eyes—Echo tries not to think of it as pride, although it looks that way. Bellamy, at least, must be pleased that this secret no longer needs to be kept.

“Well,” Raven says, after the beat of quiet that follows. “That’s not what I expected to hear.”

Emori snorts, apparently amused. “No, but it does make sense,” Murphy says. “I mean, we thought you guys were sharing a room, but this explains the time I found Echo on the bathroom floor.”

“What made you think that?” Bellamy asks, somewhere between amused and indignant—no doubt irritated that all his careful comings and goings were apparently for nothing.

“Emori’s a light sleeper, and your voice carries in the hallway,” Murphy says.

“You know, I walked by you once, really late, on my way to the showers,” Monty says, looking thoughtful. “I thought you were just ignoring me, but now I get it.”

“Why were you taking a shower in the middle of the night?” Bellamy asks.

Monty pauses, apparently not having considered this potential response. Next to him, Harper looks down at her plate, suppressing a smile. “You don’t question my schedule, I don’t question yours.”

Echo says nothing as the conversation moves onward, unwilling to draw attention back to herself. She feels Bellamy’s eyes on her, no doubt studying her, trying to gauge how she feels.

In truth, she’s not sure _how_ to feel. She’s embarrassed, yes—she hadn’t set out to confess to anything this morning, but somehow, she has. Anyway, it seems Bellamy was right. It was only a matter of time before someone else put together the clues—and in the meantime, at least a few of the others thought that she and Bellamy were having sex. Which they are—or perhaps not. Once does not make a pattern. She must try harder not to get ahead of herself.

Next to her, Emori, Murphy, and Raven have moved onto arguing about the results of a late-night game of Scrabble, but they’re all smiling, their words only playfully cutting. Monty and Harper are listening, but seem to have no stake in the fight; Harper leans in to mutter something in Monty’s ear, which makes him smile. Nobody has voiced their discomfort, or even given her a strange look.

That could change, of course. Opinions, relationships, can shift in an instant, and five years—as they are all so fond of reminding each other—is a long time. But the group’s initial reaction—or lack thereof—reminds her, quietly, that things don’t always have to get worse.

She chances a glance at Bellamy as breakfast comes to a close, all of them gathering their dishes as they do after every meal. He’s not watching her, but he looks up when she passes him on her way to the kitchens. This time, he really does smile at her, and Echo manages a smile in return.

* * *

Echo has difficulty falling asleep that night, as she often does after a particularly uneventful day. Over an hour after lights out, she’s still awake, beleaguered by a restlessness not much different from what overtook her the night before. It doesn’t help much that Bellamy has stayed away later than usual tonight—in fact, it doesn’t help at all, because now she can’t stop wondering whether he’s going to come or not.

There is, Echo has realized after several hours of nothing but contemplation, no particular reason for them to share a room anymore. Now that everyone knows about her sleepwalking, Bellamy doesn’t have to keep a close eye on her anymore. She had hoped—even assumed—that what happened last night might change things.

By the second hour, Echo can stand it no longer. She gets up and puts her boots on, although she has nowhere in particular to go and nothing in mind to do. Part of her wants to go to the radio room, to seek Bellamy out in the place where he is most likely to be—but another part of her resists, wary of seeming overeager. She is unaccustomed to making decisions such as these, as her unconscious mind is usually in control by this hour of night.

Echo has walked only ten steps from her door when she hears footsteps echoing from down the corridor—heavy, booted footsteps. She braces herself to meet anybody, but is unsurprised when Bellamy rounds the corner, sees her, and approaches, looking harried.

“Echo,” he says, drawing up close.

“I’m awake,” she says, as a precaution.

Bellamy blinks, almost as if in surprise, then frowns slightly. “I know,” he says. “You have your shoes on. Anyway, you don’t look asleep—it doesn’t matter. I have something to show you.”

Echo swallows. Bellamy doesn’t look worried, not the way he would if they were all about to die, but instead, he looks almost—nervous. “Is something wrong?” she asks.

“No,” he says immediately, shaking his head, “nothing. Just—please, humor me.”

Echo is not overly fond of humoring people, but it seems wiser to comply, so she nods. Bellamy turns, shrugging with one shoulder as if to beckon her to follow. Echo doesn’t ask what the big deal is—to borrow a phrase from Bellamy—though she’s not sure why not. Perhaps she feels, on some level, that whatever has made Bellamy this excitable is something she needs to see for herself.

Unsurprisingly, Bellamy leads the way to the radio room, his strides quick enough that the walk takes even less time than usual. Once there, he heads straight for his usual console, and Echo takes her seat without needing to be asked.

Bellamy presses a button on the console, then reaches for the headphones. “I picked this up about an hour ago,” Bellamy says, turning to face her, holding the headphones in both hands. “I’ve listened to it a hundred times, but I need you to tell me that I’m hearing what I think I’m hearing.”

He offers her the headphones, and Echo takes them, then puts them on. Bellamy watches her do this, then says, “Ready?”

Echo nods, and he reaches over to press another button. Static fills her ears, crackling and shifting continuously. But then—something changes. The static doesn’t fade, allowing other sound to replace it; rather, something takes shape within it, warped and twisted, but undeniably human. Words.

“I hear it,” Echo says, meeting his eyes. “I hear them.”

“You hear someone speaking?” Bellamy asks.

“Yes,” Echo says. “But what are they saying?”

Bellamy grimaces briefly. “Your guess is as good as mine,” he says. “That’s as clear as I can make the audio. The pitch makes me think it could be a woman, but that’s still a guess.”

Echo hopes, and not even just for Bellamy’s sake, that it is a woman—she hopes it’s Octavia, signaling from under the ground, letting them know that they’re all alive down there. It could be anybody, but it could also be someone they know, and there’s hope in that, for now.

“Let me listen again,” Echo says, reaching up to press the headphones tighter to her ears, as though making the sound as loud as she can tolerate it will help her understand. Bellamy presses the button, and the voice fills her ears once again, forming words that even she—with command of two languages to Bellamy’s one—cannot follow, muffled as they are.

Bellamy lets her listen enough times that the words lose whatever form they might have had, and then longer, until she removes the headphones, shaking her head. “It’s nonsensical,” she says. “But it’s something.”

Bellamy smiles wryly. “Guess I was hoping you had better ears than me.”

“I don’t think anybody could make sense of that,” Echo says, handing the headphones back to him. Their hands brush when he takes them back. “But we could wake the others, let them try.”

Bellamy shakes his head. “I doubt they’d have better luck than we did—and anyway, it’s not worth waking them up in the middle of the night,” he says. “I’ll tell them at breakfast.”

Echo doesn’t expect him to be overcome with joy, but something about the way he doesn’t meet her eyes, instead looking away as he sets the headphones back on top of the console, gives her pause. “Bellamy,” she says, frowning. “This is a reason to be happy.”

“I know,” he says, adjusting the volume switch, so that static fills the room at a low hum. “I’m just—pacing myself, I guess.”

“This is good news,” Echo says. “This means someone’s alive. That’s what we’ve been waiting for, even if it’s not exactly what we hoped for.”

“We don’t know if it’s live,” Bellamy points out. “That audio could be prerecorded. An alarm or distress signal, broadcasting on a loop.”

Echo hadn’t considered that, and it sends her scrambling internally for a moment. “But the ionization,” she says, the word foreign and mysterious on her tongue, “in the atmosphere. You said a signal couldn’t get in or out. Now we know that something, at least, can get out.”

“True,” Bellamy says, nodding. “It’s a good sign.”

“This is a victory,” she urges. “If someone is trying to reach us, surely they’ll try again. Maybe next time we’ll understand them.”

“A victory,” Bellamy repeats. “You know this isn’t a battle, right?”

Echo opens her mouth, instinctively defensive—they are not too long past a time when Bellamy would have accused her of viewing everything as part of war, after all. But she hesitates when she sees his mouth twitch, just a little. “Isn’t it?” she says, finally. “The fight for our survival.”

“True,” Bellamy says, still trying not to smile. “Man against nature, and all that.”

Echo takes a chance; she wants to touch him, so she does, reaching out to brush his hand where it rests on his knee. “So, will you let yourself have this?” she asks. “Call it progress, and forget your doubts?”

“I’ll do my best,” Bellamy says wryly, but he turns his hand palm-up, laces his fingers with her own.

“For tonight, at least,” Echo says.

“Yeah,” he says. “That I can do.”

The linking of their hands must have told her something, quietened the fear she’s aware of but cannot name, because it doesn’t come as much of a surprise when Bellamy leads the way from the radio room minutes later, or when he kisses her outside the door to her quarters. He follows her inside, to his bed, and takes her apart with his hands, his eyes, everything.

He’s not sleepy afterwards, like he was the night before; Echo empathizes. But he stays in bed with her, and lets her rest her head on his shoulder in the aftermath, both of their bodies slowly cooling. It’s been several minutes when he says, “Oh. I forgot.”

“Forgot what?”

“What you told the others,” he says. “This morning.”

She thought he would have to bring this up at some point—there’s been too much discussion of it between them for it to lie unspoken forever. She had hoped, though, that he might let it go until tomorrow, at least. “What about it?”

“Nothing,” Bellamy says. “Just—it wasn’t as bad as you thought it would be, was it?”

Echo lifts her head, frowning, but doesn’t leave the bed. “You don’t have to mock me.”

“That wasn’t an ‘I told you so,’” Bellamy says. “I just hope it feels better. Trusting them.”

It’s certainly easier than being anxious all the time, wondering if someone besides Bellamy might catch her in that state, not in full control of herself. He wasn’t wrong when he said that she values being in control, and that her lack of control her frightens her. She cannot deny the persistent worry that she might lose whatever amount of their trust that she has gained. But if she considers that option, she must also consider the inverse—that she would not voluntarily do anything to lose their trust in the first place. Their survival means her survival, and their companionship means her sanity. She hopes to return the favor.

“It does,” she says finally, resting her head on his shoulder once more. “I’m sure it feels better not to have to lie for me anymore.”

“I haven’t lied for you,” Bellamy says. “I have creatively dodged the truth, though.”

Echo smiles against his skin, amused, but allows silence to fall. There’s many other things she thinks he may soon wish to talk about, conversations she does not necessarily look forward to having, but for now he says nothing. Perhaps he doesn’t intend for this to go on long enough for those conversations to be had—even if he does, five years is a long time. There are so many unknowns in her future, in his, in all of theirs, that they have little choice but to take things one day at a time.

But like the voice on the radio, Echo can see promise in this moment. There is uncertainty here, to be sure, but there is also hope.


End file.
